Prologue
A/N: This is my first ever fanfic and I except everything from compliments to flames. Any criticism you have to offer is greatly accepted because I understand that it will only help me improve.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto nor do I wish too.
In the small town of Konoha there are many stories about the old buildings. Most of them are really just exaggerations of what really happened. No one really knows if there is any truth in these rumors. They vary from the most ridiculous stories to the most horrific. I never really paid much attention to these stories in my childhood and never believed them. Because of this my friends always teased me into doing stupid things. It started with the rumor of Orochimaru.
*Three years ago*
I was only eleven at the time. I was walking home from school with three of my best friends, Ino Yamanaka, Hinata Hyuga, and Tenten. Near the elementary school was an old house. Inside the house a man named Orochimaru supposedly created some creatures that only existed in the deepest pits of hell. According to story, he would take young children from the elementary school and use them to create these horrible creatures.
He had moved away at some point, well the story says he was "killed" by one his experiments. I asked my mother about him once and she said he was just a doctor. She said that the rumors were made up by people who were jealous of skill as a doctor.
We were walking past the old house when Ino opened her big mouth and said
"Hey Sakura, have you ever thought of going inside the Snake's house?"
"Ino, he was not a snake." I said. "Orochimaru was a surgeon who was very fond of snakes and no I have not thought of ever going inside."
"Why?" She asked. "Is it because deep down you actually believe the rumor and you're scared of getting torn apart by his creatures?"
"You're so stupid Ino-pig. If there really were demons in there don't you think they would have come out and killed everyone by now?"
"Don't you ever listen to the stories Billboard brow? The story says that Orochimaru put a seal around his house so none of his creatures could escape."
"The story also says he was not human but a snake in disguise, which is impossible."
Just as I said this a cold spine-chilling wind blew. It's only the wind I told myself. I really didn't feel like arguing with Ino so I tried my best to change the subject.
"Our parents will be worried if we get home late again guys." I said. "Let's get going."
"I have to agree with Sakura on this one." Hinata muttered. "My father yelled at me for getting home late. He even had Neji walk with us to make sure I would get home on time for a month."
"At least he didn't forbid you from watching TV for five days." Tenten said. "I was so bored with nothing to do except homework."
"Come on guys it's Friday." Ino said. "We can just tell them we went to the playground and lost track of time. They'll understand."
Before any of us could say a thing Ino threw her backpack over the old wooden fence and crawled through an opening.
"If you guys won't come then I'll go inside by myself!" She yelled
We heard her footsteps walk closer to the house. Sighing I threw my backpack over and went into the same opening that I had seen her go through. When I was able to stand up I took a good look at the front lawn. It was full of weeds and thorn bushes. It looked like it belonged in a horror movie. I heard Hinata and Tenten's backpacks hit the grass behind me. A few seconds later and Tenten and Hinata were right beside me.
I looked around for Ino and only saw her backpack in the same place where it had probably landed. Wanting to find my friend I started heading towards the front porch. When I stepped on the first stepped it creaked loudly. I'm pretty sure that if Ino had set foot on the porch we would have heard. I turned towards Hinata and Tenten who were looking in the windows. Curious as to what they were looking at I went towards one of the windows.
Inside I saw a flash of blonde hair. It had to be Ino. The windows were locked shut so I turned towards Hinata and Tenten for any ideas.
"Maybe there's a back door." Tenten said confidently.
She ran towards the back of the house and we followed her. There was no door but a small window that probably leads to a creepy basement. Tenten had managed to open it and was already climbing in. Hinata and I did the same and landed on the cool cement floor with a loud thud. It was really cold and dusty in there. There was an old musty scent in there. I got up and looked at the stairs. The door was already open, giving me hope that Ino was probably exploring somewhere up stairs. Tenten was already halfway up the stairs and Hinata was right on her heels.
I ran towards the stairs wanting to catch up to both of them. It would have been really dark if the windows didn't let in the light from the sun. The place was relatively normal looking to me. There was a really old TV set, a dusty arm chair, old fashioned lamp, and a book shelf.
I took a closer look at the book shelf and it was a mixture of medical books and science fiction. Some of the fiction books had really creepy titles. Maybe that also gave rise to the stupid rumors. I was gonna reach out for one of the medical books when I felt someone tap my shoulder. I jumped at the touch and turned around. It was only Tenten.
"Maybe we should split up." She said. "Hinata can you check this area?"
"O-o-okay." She answered
"Sakura, you and I can check upstairs." She said turning to me. "If there's an attic you can check it out."
"Alright, let's hurry up and get the pig so we can go home."
I dashed up the stairs that lead to the second floor of the house. I heard footsteps above me. They were probably Ino's. Looking down the hall to my left I saw the latter that lead to the attic. I ran towards it and started climbing. The old latter could barely hold my weight. On my way up it started to fall apart a bit.
Once I was in the attic I started coughing. There was so much dust up here. I felt like I was going to cough up my lungs. Then I remembered a trick that my mother showed me a while ago. She said that covering your mouth with a cloth can help you breathe better in a dusty or smoky area. I used the collar of my blouse to cover up my nose and mouth.
It was a little annoying but it was better than coughing endlessly. I looked around and was stunned by the sight.
I expected the attic to look similar to the one at my house. I was expecting to see old furniture, junk, and holiday decorations. Instead there were more shelves arranged in a maze like format. There were all sorts of things on these shelves. There were preserved dead animals, organs, books, medical equipments, and jars filled with snakes. It looked really creepy, well only the snakes did. My mom was a doctor and she brings home some weird things sometimes.
Before I could take a closer look at anything else in the shelves I heard Ino's laugh. It came from my left. There was another shelf there so I had to navigate towards Ino's stupid laughter. With turn it got louder and louder. I also noticed that the deeper I went into the maze of book shelves the more empty the shelves became. I tried to see if I could spot Ino but it was getting darker with every turn as well.
Before I could take another turn, Ino's laughter stopped. That actually scared me for a second before I shook any doubt in head gone. She's just trying to scare me, that's all, I thought to myself. I took a final turn and there was nothing but a wall. Now I was really strange. There's no way Ino could just vanish into thin air.
Then I remembered that the shelves here hardly had anything. She probably climbed one of them. I was going to look up when I felt something heavy fall on me. Whatever it was had squeezed the air out of my lungs and I couldn't breathe to well. Now the dust was also in my mouth and nose and I started coughing.
"You should really pay more attention to your surroundings Billboard brow." A familiar voice said from above me.
She got off me before I had a chance to throw her off. I covered my mouth with the collar of my blouse. I glared at her.
"Ino you pig!" I yelled at her. "You were suffocating me!"
"Not my fault that you're such an easy target." She said.
Before I could say anything else I heard a scream. It sounded kind of distant so it was most likely Hinata's scream. Ino ran ahead of me back through the maze of bookshelves. I had a little trouble keeping up because I was still catching my breath from earlier. I heard Ino go down the old ladder. I was just going down when the top of it broke off from the entrance of the attic.
I fell on Ino and the ladder fell on me. It was really heavy and I heard a really loud crack from my right arm. At first there was no pain. In fact my right arm was numb and there was no pain. I moved the ladder off of me and got off of Ino.
"Hey Sakura what was that cracking noise." She said.
I tried to move my arm and felt a lot of pain. I had to bite on my lower lip to keep from screaming out in pain. I tried to position it like it was a sling. I looked towards one of the doors in the hallway and opened. It was a bedroom. I looked around and saw drawers. I opened one and there some old shirts in there. I grabbed one and started wrapping it around my arm. It hurt and it was difficult but I managed.
I looked back into the hallway and Ino had disappeared. I was just heading downstairs when I heard two more screams. I felt my blood go cold hearing those two screams. One belonged to Tenten and the other was Ino's. I then felt angry. This was probably them just trying to scare me. I was about to take a step when I heard a male voice.
"Are there anymore of you here?" It said.
I couldn't hear a reply and I had no idea if the man was a criminal or not. I had two choices. One, I could trust the man and hope he's not going to hurt me or two, stand my ground and fight.
"Sakura, come on out he's not bad." Tenten yelled.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to believe her. The guy could be threatening her. Plus there could always be more than one. Then again Hinata would probably be crying her eyes out if this man was really trying to hurt us. I was still debating this in my head when I felt a large hand grasp my shoulder. My reaction was to kick the guy the shin.
He sort of expected this and jumped out of the way. He looked about maybe eighteen years old but I wasn't sure. He had long gray hair that he had tied in a ponytail. He wore round wire rimmed glasses over his black eyes. He didn't look too dangerous.
"What happened to your arm?" He asked.
I flinched away from him when he held out his hand. He was still a stranger, no matter how nice he was being.
"It's okay; I'm not going to hurt you." He said. "My name is Kabuto Yakushi. Let me take a look at your arm."
He held out his hand to me and I took it. He led me back downstairs to where my friends were. They were sitting on the floor. On the arm chair was a medical bag with the man's name on it. He got out some gauze from the bag and began to unwrap the shirt from my arm. Then he traced his finger on my arm. It felt like they just floated on my skin. He was making sure the bone was set right.
He then began to wrap my arm in the gauze and made me wear a sling.
"So, why don't you kids tell me why you're in here?" He said.
We told about how Ino just crawled into the front lawn by going through a hole in the wooden fence. How she ran off inside the house and that we were just trying to find her. Then Ino mentioned that she wanted to see if the story of Orochimaru was true. He laughed when he heard that part.
"Those stories aren't true." He stated. "I should know; I'm the man's apprentice. He seems to have an interest in snakes. As for the whole experiment on children, he reads a lot of science fiction novels that involve grafting animal DNA into humans. The poor test subjects in the story are usually children and he likes to quote the books a lot. At some point someone thought he was the one conducting the experiments."
"See Ino-pig!" I yelled at her. "He was a normal doctor."
"It was an honest mistake." She said. "So then why did he leave?"
"He was tired of all the rumors and a big hospital in the city of Sound offered him a large amount of money to come work there. That's where I met him. He wanted me to get some things from this house that he forgot."
"What did he forget?"
He thought about for a moment. He scratched his trying to remember what it was that he came for.
"He really wanted me to get his books and some of the medical specimens in the attic." He answered finally. "The rest of the specimens that he doesn't want are supposed to belong to me now."
"What d-d-d-do you m-mean by specimens?" Hinata asked nervously.
"I mean the stuff in glass jars. I can't really take too many with me since I already have a collection of my own, so I'll probably just donate them to a school or something."
I thought about that for a moment. I wanted to become a doctor like mom. After all mom is the greatest medical ninja.
"Mr. Yakushi?" I asked.
"You can call me Kabuto." He answered.
"Can I keep the unwanted specimens? I want to be a medic when I grow and maybe they can help me out."
He smiled at me. It was the kind of smile a teacher would give to their star pupil.
"I don't see any harm in that." He answered.
I smiled. I really wanted to be a medic and now I felt like I was taking my first major step on the road to becoming one.
"You're so weird Billboard brow." Ino commented.
"Shut up pig!" I yelled back. "At least I know what I'm gonna do after I finish high school."
"Guys don't fight right now." Tenten said annoyed.
"Why don't we get out of here now?" Kabuto said. "I can drop you girls off at your homes."
We all nodded in response. The rest of the day went by as normal but that event changed our lives. That was the first time Ino had ever tried to prove that one of the old Konoha stories were true. It was also the first time that she had to admit that I was right.
After that we started to do look into one of the stories of Konoha every once in a while. In the three years that we'd been doing this I've always been right. Ino was not going to give up so easily so, we wound up looking into a lot of the old stories of Konoha. They all only held an ounce of truth. None of them were completely true. Tenten and Hinata would come along with us. The two of them only believed a handful of the stories. The one everyone in town believed in was the tale of the Uchiha manor.
In the remote forest near the area was the old Uchiha manor. A whole massacre had happened there over fifty years ago. The whole Uchiha clan would gather every few months and try to stay close. The head of the family was a man named Fugaku. He had two sons, Itachi the oldest and Sasuke the youngest. During one of the family gatherings Itachi massacred his family. He was twenty one at the time. Sasuke lived and killed Itachi before he escaped the manor. Unfortunately Itachi had a gun and shot Sasuke dead right on the spot.
Supposedly Sasuke fell on top of his brother and the two died together. Before the whole ordeal both brothers were very close to each other. According to the story, the brothers never went on to the next world and their spirits are trapped in the manor. On the month of the massacre supposedly they fight each other, trying to end the other's existence. It's the only time they can ever fight. The rest of the year they try to pretend that the massacre never happened and get along.
I ever even once considered this one to be true, ever. So of course Ino had to challenge me to prove the story wrong. It was a challenge that I was ready to accept. I knew Ino would have brought it up sooner or later. I was actually hoping to look into this one. It would be a challenge to prove this one wrong. After all, the tragedy did happen fifty years ago. Who knew what was inside the old manor?
