Author's Notes:

Alrighty, fourth chapter. Here we go.

Disclaimer: If I had a billion dollars, I'd purchase the copyright to Naruto and have Masashi-kun revive all the Akatsuki- or at least make a spinoff. But I don't. And the only way I ever would is if I wrote fifteen international bestsellers.

At this point, I am in no position to achieve such an amazing feat.

Fallyn angrily shoved several more books into her small duffel bag, muttering obscenely about her encounter with the plant man. Dropping her iPod into the bag, she zipped it up forcefully and threw it onto her bed.

To calm herself, she took one last nostalgic walk through her other books, running a loving hand over the bindings of her only friends, reminiscing all the times they comforted her when poisonous memories came flooding back into her mind, when she couldn't keep her tears from falling, when her mental breakdowns were too drastic to control.

These strangers' words were her mothers and fathers, her sisters and brothers, her lovers and rivals.

These strangers' words were her bedtime stories, the goodnight whispers of a younger sibling when they had a nightmare and requested sharing a bed, the warmth of an affectionate embrace. They let her experience scenarios that her social exile had forced her to go without, let her feel the pain of a breakup when she had never been in a relationship in the first place. They let her experience the notion of a functional family, and they gave her friends, brothers, sisters, even nightmares, all which she accepted with open arms.

And now she was being forced to abandon all of her companions.

She dug her nails into her skin, squeezing until the pressure in her mind ebbed away.

Taking note of the crescent-shaped indentations in her flesh, she pulled a long sleeved shirt over her arms. She tugged on some pants and shoes, shouldered her pack, and, with one last longing glance at her previous life, she stepped out of her room.

-X-

Madara smirked into the leather bound tome, rifling through the pages where the emotionally traumatized girl puked up her bitterness, hatred, loneliness, and dry musings.

This was exactly what he had meant by background intel.

He chuckled sinisterly to himself.

Now she was just a doll for him to manipulate.

-X-

Fallyn walked the halls, searching for one of her particularly long, particularly favorite books. She was surprised to find the rooms she visited empty, nothing out of place.

Glancing warily around, she continued to search the stacks.

With her search of the foyer fruitless, she rounded one of the larger stacks with the intent of leaving the room, but she was met with the barrier of a black-cloaked chest.

Hating the fact that most of these men were taller than her good size of 5'7", she craned her head only slightly up, and was met by the purple ringed eyes of Pein.

Startled, she jerked back, knocking over a good-sized pile of books and landing among the sharp cardboard covers and bending thin pages.

Cursing, she made a vain attempt to struggle from amid the books, but she only succeeded in burying herself deeper within the quicksand pages.

The man smirked, and offered a finely built arm. She glared darkly up at him, smothering the fangirl-y instinct to grin like an idiot as she glanced on the flesh-and-blood version of her favorite character.

He raised his orange eyebrows, and emphasized his waiting hand with a small twitch.

Not breaking eye contact, she ignored his gesture, instead opting to stay inside the pile of books to braving the sea of words and making a fool of herself trying to get out of her predicament.

He frowned, and his hand returned to its rightful place at his side.

"What do you want?" she hissed, shifting positions to get more comfortable.

"Just coming to see if you're ready. We're leaving," he replied apathetically.

She gave him an incredulous look, and glanced at a clock on her wall, reading 2:00 AM.

"But it's two in the morning," she said slowly, enunciating every syllable, hoping he would register the absurdity of his comment.

He looked unfazed.

"I'm aware," he said calmly, smirking down at her.

"But… It's two in the morning," she said again, shaking her head slightly.

"The time shouldn't be a problem, considering you're already up," he said, a dark underlying tone of amusement stirring the embers of her constantly burning anger.

"Oh, no, I'm not already up; I never went to sleep."

He quirked a single vibrant eyebrow, saying in a consoling tone, "Why wouldn't you want to sleep?"

She scowled, and sneered at him, "If you had strange serial killers walking around your house, would you feel comfortable going to sleep?"

Chuckling darkly, he stepped over some fallen book-rubble and pulled her up forcefully from the pile. She struggled and protested to no avail as he hoisted her bag over his shoulder and dragged her down the hall, wasting no time tossing her in the air as he descended down the stairs, and catching her again as she fell.

Waiting in her front yard were all nine fearsome criminals, each standing in a circle over pairs of Summoning Scrolls. Pein dragged her towards the center, where two black and gold-embellished scrolls crossed each other in a grand compilation of black symbols and inscriptions. He unceremoniously dropped her on the thin paper, darted over to his own pair of scrolls, and began a furious string of blurry hand seals.

The other members followed suit, and soon within seconds, all had disappeared without a trace, save for an alienable breeze that whistled through the green leaves.

-X-

Fallyn spun through an endless black void, tumbling head over heels in a never-ending, dizzying circle. While she gained momentum, no sound of wind that usually accompanied a fall was to be heard. There was only a deathly silence- and she realized, as her throat began to dry and burn, that she had been screaming with no sound, too.

While under usual circumstances she would have assumed that she was in some kind of vacuum, the case was quite the opposite. Hurtling through nothingness, without traces of where she was going or where she came from, with no sound or no feeling of another presence, Fallyn found that not a thought crossed her mind as her body pumped useless adrenaline through her veins.

Then, suddenly, she found herself on the floor.

There was no bone-shattering impact, no jarring to a stop, and no gradual expanse of light that forewarned her of a coming exit. She was simply not there, and then there.

Adrenaline leaving her a shaking heap on the floor, Fallyn strained to process her surroundings.

She found herself in a dark room, lit by a single sputtering candle. What faint light it cast illuminated an impossibly uncomfortable looking bed devoid of a blanket and a pillow and a small table set beside it. The walls beside it had an undeterminable pattern that looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn't see enough to identify it with certainty.

Once her shudders passed, she dragged herself to a standing position and lumbered over to the candle. With a weak grip, she barely managed to hold the brass handle without allowing the lip of the saucer to dip and dive, spilling wax. Fortifying her grip with another hand, she waved the flame around slowly, spilling faint golden light around the rest of the room.

Other than a trunk at the foot of the bed, there was nothing else inside the room. Cautiously, she made her way through the sparsely furnished bedroom, her shoes tapping faintly on the stone floor.

The door was a pitiful thing, a plywood panel that seemed that it would break at the lightest touch. She gingerly turned a cold brass knob, and ducked through the low frame.

Snake-molded sconces lined the hallways at constant, distant intervals, casting enough light for the simple use of illumination, but not enough to feel comfortable in the sinister hall. Shadows danced in all corners, and they breached the areas where the light from the sconces did not connect, giving Fallyn the feeling of being watched from every darkened section of the passage. Arcing patterns carved into the sand-gold walls continued in a never-ending swirl, dizzying if one moved too fast.

She identified the hallway immediately.

She couldn't fathom how, but she was in Orochimaru's lair.

She dropped the brass saucer holding the wax tower, hot candle liquid splattering and drying instantly on the cold stone floor. Glancing frantically around, she bolted down the passage, her adrenaline returning with a vengeance. Her steps echoed loudly, resonating off of the walls and reverberating in her head, sounding almost like a mocking cackle.

As that though passed her mind, she forced herself to skid to a stop. The clattering of her hurried escape ceased, but the sharp ring of laughter did not.

She whirled around, but only saw a flash of white race past her. She followed its momentum, but nothing was in the passage before her, either.

Then an unpleasant sound scratched along the floor- a noise that made a person shiver, like fingernails running up and down paper.

Like the sound of scales on the grit of the floor.

Fallyn slowly turned her body back to the direction from which she came.

There, slithering in the shadows, the feeble light from the torches shining on their dull scales, was a horde of writhing, squirming snakes, led by a single white sliver of reptile.

She stood, frozen, in a state of utter horror, unable to muster as much as a whimper.

Right as the mass of oily scales were about to converge upon her, she found her strength again, and began to back up, her pace increasing until she was running. She turned back around, and began to sprint down the hall, as far away from the snakes as she could get.

But coming up the other end of the hall, a good fifteen feet before her, was another group of the foul reptilian creatures.

She stopped herself, nearly falling on her face for the momentum that was carried behind her, and whirled around again. Still slithering toward her, the first horde was coming upon her, still quite distant, but gaining speed quickly.

She could see no end to their procession.

Fear strangled her senses, her ears ringing. She whipped her head back and forth between the two imminent groups of flitting tongues, venomous fangs, and reptile armor, only able to watch as the snakes made their way closer and closer to her.

A tiny whisper hissed in her mind, Why don't you try a hand seal, girl?

The Eleven Tails.

What hand seal? Fallyn hissed back, moving quickly in the last bit of space she had left.

Well, I don't know. Why don't you just try one?

"You don't know?" she yelled, incredulous, shaking as the reptiles came increasingly closer and closer.

JUST TRY ONE!

She slammed her hands together, imitating a couple of the seals she had observed while watching the show. She felt a swell of heat in her veins, and a jet of blue-black flame erupted from the back of her throat, singeing a good half of one of the knots of reptiles. The rest were startled by the amount of heat and scurried to the corners of the hall, hissing warily.

Unfortunately, the white snake had escaped her fire.

Blanching at the jutsu she had performed, it took her a few moments to start moving again. But once she got started, she knew nothing could stop her.

She flew down the halls in the direction she had come from, turning corners blindly and getting herself lost in the labyrinth of halls.

"This place never ends!" she shouted before she could stop herself, and her voice carried boisterously through the halls.

Shut up, you stupid girl, hissed the Eleven Tails, you're going to alert-

But it was too late.

"Found you," hissed Sasuke, drawing a kunai dangerously across her throat.

Fallyn sucked in her breath, all her muscles going rigid in the ninja's grasp.

She knew this man was someone to be afraid of, regardless of how many fangirls made him seem like a lovesick, docile little boy.

Clenching her eyes shut, she drew in a ragged breath to calm her nerves.

"You're going to walk down the hall with me, and you will not struggle. You will comply completely. You will not make a sound. And you will obey everything I say. Understood?" he growled, almost gleefully. The cold metal of his blade pressing into the sensitive flesh of her neck in warning, she clenched her fists and gave her head the slightest nod, worried that any more of a drastic movement would force the blade through her skin.

He began to walk down one of the halls she had just come from, and she shuffled along delicately in front of him, drawing her jugular as far back from the blade as she could bring it.

She could feel the small smirk emanating from Sasuke's body as he led her into a small room with a steel table in the center. The room was quite spacious, and several surgical implements were lined up along the walls, varying from a small scalpel to a drastically large saw that looked like it had seen its fair share of grisly, medieval amputations.

Fallyn was led directly to the table, and strapped there by leather straps that she had not noticed when she had first entered the room. Sasuke smirked down at her, pleased with himself. She glared at him with all the might her golden gaze could muster, but it only made his smirk grow in its malice.

"Orochimaru will be with you shortly," he said with a dryly amused tone.

She winced, and her gaze darkened. "Do you know what he wants?" she asked, her voice like iron.

"Yes," he said patiently, raising one thing black eyebrow.

Her brow furrowed at him, and she said after a moment's pause, "Can you tell me?"

"No."

"Didn't think so."

He shook his head, and disappeared.

Shocked, she cried, "Hey! Wait! Come back!"

Not surprisingly, there was no further sight of the raven-haired Ukiah.

Now left to herself, she envisioned the snake man entering this room, with her strapped down to a table, unable to defend herself from whatever he wanted to do.

Suddenly, she heard that same noise- snake armor was scratching at the little rocks that littered the stone floor.

Her muscles tensed, and she grunted and clenched her eyes shut. The unseen snake made its leisurely way over to her, taking its time and toying with her nerves.

Then the sound stopped.

She froze, and her eyes snapped open, her neck straining against her bonds as she tried to survey the room.

She twisted and turned, stretching the leather as far as it would go. She couldn't find any trace of a snake.

Then she felt an oily, cold, thin body twining around her feet. She stared at the ceiling, her face a mask of mortification, and slowly moved her face to her lower half.

There, with a mocking glint in its reptilian eyes, was a white snake, its scales glinting in the dim light, staring at her with malicious glee.

She drew in a sharp breath, and violently shook her leg as much as she could while they were tightly bound.

The creature only seemed to be more amused, and continued its way up her leg unhindered.

When it reached her thigh, it stopped. She stared down at it, horrified, as it opened its mouth, revealing two drastically long, pearly white fangs. Looking like it was grinning at her, it sank its fangs into her flesh, venomous liquid pouring from its teeth and into her veins.

In an instant, she was unconscious.

-X-

Having been used to summoning transportation, Pein no longer found it an unaccommodating way to travel. While the other members got a nauseating sense of vertigo, he only lost control of his body for a short amount of time.

When they arrived back at the base, a dank stone cave somewhere deep in the Hidden Rain Village, they all collapsed- Pein because of his lost signal, everyone else from nausea.

Slowly, one by one the members recovered from their traveling sickness, and left to complete their own daily routines on their non-work days.

The metal chakra receptors slowly intercepted the signals sent from Nagato, high on his mountaintop cave, and the Deva Path slowly rose from the floor with great grace. He surveyed the great cavern around him, attempting to locate the Jinchuriki.

The world stopped.

He sprinted through every cavern, investigated every crevice, tuned in to the chakra-sensing rain outside.

She was nowhere.

"Itachi!" he called, his commanding voice resonating throughout the hideout.

In an instant, the quiet man appeared in a swirl of darkness and midnight feathers.

"Sir?" he asked stoically, raising an eyebrow at his leader's disheveled expression.

"She's not here. Did you sense any interfering chakra during our travel?" His intense gaze burrowed into Itachi's apathetic one.

"Yes."

After a moment's apprehensive pause, Pein hissed, "And?"

"Orochimaru."

"Oh... Fuck."

Now, rarely ever did Pein use profanity to express his discontentment, but he had come this far, and he was quite displeased that Orochimaru, of all the people that could have intercepted their chakra transportation, was the one who wanted to screw with his plans.

Quite displeased.

"Do you know which base he is currently stationed at?" Pein demanded, his tone sinking into something dark and malicious- more like its usual tone.

"The northern hideout," Itachi stated in his usual bored voice.

The orange haired leader nodded sternly, and his underling took that as his dismissal. But as he was about to exit the room, the Deva Path said, "Itachi. I want you and Kisame to go re-capture her."

The other man paused, barely turning to acknowledge the comment. "Are you sure? If Sasuke's there, she'll be caught in the crossfire," he pointed out apathetically, a malicious smirk ghosting the sides of his lips.

Pein's brow knitted together dangerously, and tension crackled like lightning through the stale air of the cave.

"You're responsible for her life."

The Uchiha's fleeting smirk dissipated.

"Hn."

-X-

Fallyn awoke from a dreamless, venom-induced slumber in an area she least expected.

She was faced with the morning rays of the sun, golden light filtering through light green leaves. The soft, distant shriek of birds gently brought her back to the world of consciousness.

With startling realization, she bolted upright.

Gone were the musty golden walls, the choking clouds of dust and the smell of reptilian oil, the steel tables and mortifying metal instruments.

Gone were Orochimaru and Sasuke.

As much as she would have like to be relieved, she couldn't help but to feel something amiss.

She began to stand, but immediately fell back on the underbrush with an agonized scream. Pain lanced through her left thigh, sending spastic shockwaves through her body, the convulsions nearly making her retch.

Dry coughs scraped through her sore throat flesh, raw from her shriek. She curled up into a protective ball, cradling her injured leg to her chest. Warm blood leaked onto her shirt and soaked through in an unpleasant, sticky stream. She felt a powerful stirring inside of her, reacting to her misery but it was interrupted by the sound of a familiar person.

"Hey, did you hear that?" came a distant, severed voice from the foliage a good distance away.

"Naruto, everyone heard that," came the annoying, patronizing tone of a teenage girl.

"I read in a book once that a scream like that can either mean great pain or orgasm," said a third voice, unabashed and cheerful.

"Sai!" the two voices screamed in unison, closer now.

"What?"

They were nearly there.

Soon enough, the threesome parted the bushes not three feet from where Fallyn lay in a crumpled heap.

Sakura Haruno was the first to walk through the parted path of the shrubs, her pink hair vibrant in the mid-morning light, with never-ending vitality. She was followed by the paper-pale, socially awkward Sai, his thin midriff exposed and his Beast Scroll in hand.

Then there was the blonde haired, blue eyed protagonist himself, the dobe of all dobes, Naruto.

The vigilant blonde marched fearlessly right up to Fallyn, putting his face up to hers and inspecting her with curious, warm, sky-blue eyes. "Whoa, what happened to you?" he asked loudly and unsympathetically into her ear.

"Naruto, you idiot, she's injured," scolded the bubblegum-pink haired girl, who angrily shoved the vigorous boy out of the way before kneeling down next to her with a kind look in her chlorine-green eyes. "Where are you hurt?" she asked gently, helping Fallyn unfold herself from her cramped position.

She didn't need an answer though- blood flowed freely from the twin puncture marks gaping in her flesh, and a marring purple infection was spreading from the poison's entrance point.

"Oh dear," she breathed, her brow scrunching up in determination. "You need intense medical care. I can stem the bleeding for now, but we'll have to get you back to the Leaf soon, okay?"

Fallyn, the loss of blood making her weak, could only manage the slight bowing of her head as confirmation.

The female medic leaned over her thigh, and a milky green aura emanated from her outstretched hands. The pain went from dull to insistent, and a slow burn spread through her flesh. A small groan rasped through her dry throat, a sound quiet and subtle but filled with pure physical torment.

"Almost done...!" said Sakura, wincing as she felt the chakra drain from her body as she closed the wound.

"Sakura, we have to get her back to the village!" insisted Naruto, "We don't have to heal everything!"

The misty glow-stuffs evaporated from the medic's hands, and she clenched her be-gloved fists.

"Naruto," she began in a dangerous growl, and the blonde immediately cringed, "I'm aware. Now. You and Sai can carry her the entire way, how's that?"

The ivory skinned artist merely grinned in the face of his female companion's rage and stated bluntly, "I can't help but wonder if Sakura-chan's current quick temper is a result of menstruation?"

Naruto, who was in the process of hoisting Fallyn over his shoulders, cast a horrified glance over at his comrade, furiously shaking his head with vigorous urgency.

Sakura regarded the apathetic teen in tension-charged silence.

But before she could deliver some sort of judgment in the defense of her womanhood, Fallyn let out an incomprehensible groan and passed out in Naruto's arms.

"We have to get her to a medic, now!" shouted the dobe, "You two can settle what you want, I'm bringing her to the hospital!"

And with that, he launched into the trees.

-X-

Itachi and Kisame stood in front of the hidden entrance to Orochimaru's lair, Itachi staring silently at the rock and Kisame fidgeting uncomfortably, waiting for his partner to move.

"Itachi-san," the Demon Shark said after a time, "shouldn't we…go in?"

Slowly, the doll-like man turned towards him disdainfully, his endless black irises blank. "Fine," he purred standoffishly, his hand making the faintest gesture towards the boulder.

The fish man's thin lips pulled back over his needle-like teeth in a horrific smirk, and he drew his massive sword, its wait comfortable and reassuring in his hands. With a great arcing swing, he brought his Samehada down on the boulder, the force from his bone-shattering blow crumbling the rock.

The two stepped over the rubble and into the endless labyrinth.

"Orochimaru, we know she's been here," hissed Kisame, the force of his bulk and the point of his sword cornering the arrogant snake man. "This place reeks of her chakra."

The pale, oily man grinned, his barely-there lips disappearing as he stretched his face muscles into the mortifying expression. "Oh, yes, of course she's been here," he said gleefully. "But I've already finished my business with her."

In a whir of feathers, Itachi had the reptilian male by his thin neck. Even when his fingers were curled around another man's throat, even when he held a man's life in the force of his grip, his face didn't portray a shred of emotion.

"While I don't usually care for the life of anybody other than myself," he growled sullenly, "this is one exception, for the mission's sake." His slender fingers tightened around the other man's jugular, and he leaned forward to whisper into the grinning snake's ear, "Where." His grip contracted. "Is." He felt the trachea of the man struggling to breathe. "She?"

Before the weasel could squeeze the rest of the oxygen from his lungs, Orochimaru's body fell in on itself, falling to the floor in a heap of writhing white snakes. They slithered between the two ninja's legs, who did nothing to stop them, and crawled over each other until they were a good distance away from the two, where they molded back together into the shape of a man.

"Oh, don't worry," he purred, his voice poisoned, festering sugar, "I didn't kill her."

He leapt onto a ledge in the cavern they were standing in, his landing echoing throughout the room.

"You could probably check in with some Leaf ninja, though. They might have an idea of her whereabouts."

He slipped into the shadows, but his disembodied voice resonated through the spacious chamber. "Itachi-kun, you might want to leave quietly, too- wouldn't want Sasuke to catch you creeping through the halls, would you?"

His cackle bounced off the walls in a cacophony of maniac laughter.

Unfazed, the Uchiha turned to his partner. "Kisame, are you sure the girl isn't in any of the other passages or rooms here?"

The blue-skinned man shook his head. "Traces of her chakra are practically floating through the air, but it's all quite stale. She's been gone for two days, at most."

"Very well then. We'll leave now."

"No, I don't think so, Itachi," hissed a voice from the cavern's exit.

There, standing with his sword drawn and contempt in his gaze, was Sasuke.

"You're staying right here."

Itachi's shark companion shot a subtle, nervous glance at his partner, his hand gripping the leathery hilt of his sword apprehensively.

"Ah, brother," droned the weasel, his face empty. "It is so nice to see you; and to see you so grown up."

The younger boy's hand visibly clenched around the handle of his blade, and his glare gained a maniac flash.

"I want my revenge. Fight me, and let us settle this once and for all."

A weak but meaningful smirk pulled at the corner of Itachi's full lips.

Feathers scattered in flurry of flight, and Sasuke was blinded in a cloud of dark bird-matter.

His head was gently shoved back, a motion he recognized only too well- his brother's signature forehead poke.

His older brother's silken voice shot clearly through the sound of flapping wings.

"Forgive me, Sasuke. Again, next time."

When the feathers fell and the raven could see again, both his brother and his comrade were gone.

Ending Notes:

Oh god, everybody, I'm sorry AGAIN.

I've put my sketchbook away so I won't be tempted with DeviantART again.

I'm only going to be writing for the next few months.

Please review- I'd appreciate it greatly.