A/N: I hope this chapter is satisfactory. There was a decent amount of changes based on what was revealed in canon. Massive spoilers for the series itself, so I would recommend finishing Naruto before continuing. Happy reading!

Chapter 35: Spirit

"Let me through." Kakashi said to the two ANBU guarding the door.

"Sorry Senpai. Orders."

They knew him from his silver hair, that was for sure, even though none of them had so much as mentioned a name. As of late, it seemed like Kurotsuki's hospital room was accompanied by entirely too many ANBU. "There's really no need to have two cells in the room with her. She's probably too tired to put up a fight anyway. She was completely passed out after the Exam."

"Tell that to the cell that she took out when escaping yesterday," the blond man on his right growled.

He was stunned. "What do you mean, 'took out?'" he asked.

"She fought them down, barehanded, and casually left through the window. They're on the second floor if you want to go see the damage for yourself," he spat. Clearly, he didn't think too highly of the woman he was guarding. "The Hyuuga are getting drawn into the investigation now."

"Investigation...?"

"Yes, investigation." The clacking of high heels on linoleum stopped just behind him. "This has gone on far too long."

Kakashi whirled around. "Tsunade-sama. Ibiki-san." The torture master was just behind the Hokage.

"I trust the mission went as planned?" she asked brusquely.

"Yes. What-"

"Did she do? Other than break through Ibiki's chains, put her guards in the hospital using Neji's trademark techniques, and been in this village much too long for what we know about her? You tell me, Hatake." She crossed her arms across her ample chest.

"I... don't know that much more than you," he confessed.

"I let her stay in this village because having a shinobi with that amount of power in service to another village wouldn't be very beneficial for us. I put Kurotsuki on your team, because I know that you are loyal to Konohagakure and a trained ANBU professional, even though you choose not to hold that title for the majority of the time. I expected that you would find out whether she was trustworthy and report to me if she was not. And it's taken until she demolished the rest of the field at the Jounin Exam for me to find out that not only am I severely lacking in information about her, but so are you." Tsunade's golden glare bored into the holes in his ANBU mask.

"I apologize for not completing my duties, Hime-sama," he said between clenched teeth. All he wanted at the moment was to see her and know that she was ok.

"Step aside, Hatake," Ibiki said, stepping forward towards the door of the room. "The mysteries end here."

"Let me talk to her. Let me come with you," the man said, doing his best to keep the pleading out of his voice.

"No." Tsunade said firmly. "Report to ANBU headquarters and turn in your uniform. Usually you can't wait to get it off after the Exam is done. It will be ready for you when you proctor next year."

"As you wish, Hime-sama," Kakashi forced himself to say. He vanished from the hospital corridor and appeared on the street outside. He knew Tsunade had run out of patience. She would do what was necessary to keep the village safe, and make Kurotsuki spill all the beans that she had been keeping to herself. It would be done by the end of the night, by whatever means necessary. "I'm sorry," he whispered to the window of the room where Kurotsuki was. "I'm sorry for everything."

"I'll come with you, no need to get violent," Neji murmured to the two ANBU that had come to the Hyuuga compound to collect him. "How many injured?"

"Four." They picked up the pace as the gate slowly swung shut.

"Condition?" he asked brusquely.

The one on his left shrugged. "Not good."

He pursed his lips. It was Kurotsuki who had done it, that much the ANBU had already confirmed. A few members of the Main Family and himself were the only other ones that could use those techniques. They were a special class of Juuken techniques, which were best described as a type of controlled chaos. Your chakra had to be precisely inserted into the opponent's chakra system, but after that, you gave your chakra a little nudge to do whatever it wanted. He figured he would be in some sort of trouble later for having taught Kurotsuki the technique which she had used to harm ANBU of her own village. But the more pressing concern was the medics needed a little guidance with the healing. They weren't used to having to treat Juuken style injuries, since the Hyuuga were with Konoha, not against them. Then there was the problem that Juuken attacks, since done through the chakra pathways, with chakra, were notoriously hard to track down for healing.

Two ANBU ran up the side of the hospital into a room on the second floor. The sound of beeping met their ears. It wasn't frantic, just keeping track of the patients' heartbeats.

"Neji-san, this woman needs the most help," the nurse in the room said, waving him over.

The Hyuuga placed his hands on her chest, closed his eyes and lowered his head, focusing. His brow furrowed as his carefully controlled chakra probed her system. The different places where attacks had landed seemed to belong in one of two categories. Some were just enough to harm and make someone flinch. The others were more along the lines of causing as much damage as possible. "Place your hands on me and follow my chakra," he murmured to the nurse. "You'll want to find someone to take your place when we move to the next patient. This is going to take a while..."

Her mind slowly drifted into consciousness, pulled sharply from the blissful blankness of her passed-out sleep. Kurotsuki took a small gasping breath and forced her eyes open, in time to see the Hokage withdraw a small syringe from her saline drip and dispose of it in a biohazard container. "Hokage-sama."

The woman turned and fixed her with a stern glare. "Spill. Or he'll make you," she barked, inclining her head towards Ibiki.

A pause, during which Morino Ibiki mentally compiled a list of techniques he'd already tried on the silver-haired woman that hadn't worked, way back when she had first shown up in Konoha.

"You're not going to believe any of this," Kurotsuki whispered, turning her head slowly to look at them.

"We'll be the judge of that."

Another pause.

"Are you familiar with the legend of Kaguya Ootsuki?" She coughed briefly, her throat dry from her long time asleep.

"Obviously," Tsunade said sharply, grudgingly holding a cup of water to Kurotsuki's lips so she could drink. "The mother of the Sage of the Six Paths and 'creator' of chakra."

"And the origin of the tailed beasts?"

The Hokage furrowed her brow. "They are manifestations of enormous amounts of chakra, nothing more."

The silver-haired woman blinked. "You haven't heard the whole story then."

"Enlighten me," Ibiki drawled, disbelieving.

"Kaguya Ootsuki was jealous of her twin sons' power and wanted to take back the chakra they had inherited. To do this, she joined with the Shinju to create a Ten-Tailed Beast. Her sons, Hagoromo and Hamura, defeated her and sealed the body of the Ten-Tailed Beast, and Hagoromo took the chakra of the beast within himself, becoming the first Jinchuuriki." She paused to draw a few breaths, tired from the act of speaking. "Hagoromo became known as the Sage of the Six Paths for saving the world from his mother's wrath, and upon leaving this world, split the chakra of the Ten-Tailed Beast into the nine that still roam today."

"Oh you have got to be making this all up," Ibiki growled, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his black trench coat in frustration.

"It gets better," she said tonelessly from the small hospital bed. "When the Ten-Tails was created, her Spirit was created. And when her body was sealed away, it fled to any container that could hold such power, and such chaos. As luck would have it, a large, perfect ruby was the closest thing that fit the bill, and that's where her Spirit was housed."

"Enough with the story time," Tsunade snapped. "What does any of this have to do with who you are?"

"A ruby-mining town sprung up in the area, Kougyoku. It didn't take them long to figure out that the one giant ruby that had caused the town's founding was somehow evil and affecting those who were around it. People became depressed, angry, or just plain violent." Another pause to catch her breath. "So they decided to house the Spirit in a living being rather than a ruby, figuring that a host would provide better control. All the animal trials failed. Adults worked, but didn't last long. They eventually figured that the Spirit feeds on anything negative. The adults that volunteered because they had nothing to lose always lost it sooner than those who believed they were sacrificing themselves for the greater good of the village. The researchers then got the brilliant idea of using children as vessels, because of their innocence. The children they tested were orphans in the area who were 'donated' to their 'very important research'. And so, we were pushed to the physical limits of the human body, forced to endure every punishment, and 'strengthen our minds' against psychological torture. To 'harden' us and prepare us. When one of us began to show promise, the child was brought to the edge of death, and offered to the Spirit as a vessel. I was the seventy-first child tested. I was the only one to survive."

Silence greeted her.

"The vanishing town..." the interrogator said slowly, making the connection.

"You're saying she's right?" Tsunade demanded.

"In the middle of winter, thirteen years ago, the entire ruby mine and the surrounding town, vanished in a night."

"How."

"Everything burned down, everyone dead. The original report came from a man and his son, who'd returned from a trading trip to find the town in shambles. We offered them shelter in Konoha and a Genin team sent on a mission to find-" He stopped abruptly.

"What now?" the Hokage asked, annoyed. The whole story was ridiculous to begin with, but now Morino Ibiki's famously exact memory was actually backing it up.

"... the girl. They reported a 6- to 8-year old child with silver hair and black eyes who ran when they showed up. You. But the eyes are wrong."

Kurotsuki closed her eyes slowly. "She has the ability to amplify negative feelings and somehow mold it into chakra. If it's from Her, it always comes out as black and red." The woman opened her eyes, the ultramarine irises replaced with black and haloed in a demonic red. "It shows sometimes, when my control isn't perfect." She blinked and her eyes returned to normal. "Somewhere along the way, I learned to convert it to healing chakra, but that wound up being white."

"So the scar on your neck is from the day you became the vessel, and the seal is for the Spirit," Tsunade stated bluntly. She watched the woman's eyes widen in horror as she realized that her forehead protector was gone, along with the cloth necklace that usually hid her scar. The seal itself resembled the Hyuuga Branch Family's seal, but the bent cross in the middle had been replaced with the three tomoe of the sharingan. "Fetch me Hyuuga Hiashi," she said to one of the ANBU in the room, who promptly vanished. "So you're telling me that the Spirit of the Ten-Tails has been sealed within you and that's what gives you an enormous boost in chakra. Which is technically negativity converted to chakra. And Her takeovers are the 'condition' that you've been vaguely telling everyone about?"

She gave a tiny nod. "Not just perks though. When the full moon is out, my control wanes and She tends to have more control over my body. It used to be just nausea and a fever, but it's been getting worse over the years. Now it's usually some combination of destructive rampage, severe bodily self-harm, becoming somewhat wolfish, and an outpouring of emotions that aren't really mine." Kurotsuki grimaced. "I tend to lose finesses for chakra-control for a few days too."

"The end of the Jounin Exam," Tsunade realized.

"Yes, that's what happened at the end of the Jounin Exam. And any other time I've had inexplicable illnesses, bouts of sadness, or bursts of chakra. She's behind it all. Also, as the Spirit of the Ten-Tails, she knows what happens to the other tailed beasts. You should know that the Akatsuki have seven of them sealed away now. They're hunting the eighth soon."

"Shit," Morino Ibiki murmured, "None of my intel had it as that many. Hokage-sama, I need to send a message to the Raikage."

"Of course," she said brusquely, as the interrogator swept out of the room. The blonde turned back to the woman on the bed. "So that's also how you know Gaara. He was the Jinchuuriki of the Ichibi and that's how you found him. That's how you knew that he'd died at the hands of the Akatsuki."

A small nod. "She can feel it. I found Gaara when he was still a child. We understood each other. He's like a little brother."

"What about your doujutsu, the sharingan and byakugan mixed together? You told me when you returned from Suna that you'd received blood from both the Uchiha and Hyuuga clans as an experiment to cure your 'condition' caused by the Spirit."

"By the time the researchers got around to the 71st test subject, they decided that perhaps strengthening the blood of the child might help them become a vessel. So they hired an Uchiha and a Hyuuga on a protection mission for the time that I was to be nearly killed and told them to 'protect' me by giving me blood. I didn't get enough to survive on that alone, but She took advantage of the extra power and saved me." A pause. "Sometimes I wish She hadn't."

"I hope you're not expecting sympathy," the Hokage said flatly.

"...No."

"You still haven't explained where all your training came from. If you left Kougyoku at 8, how did you learn any shinobi arts before showing up-"

Two taps at the door cut her off. The ANBU operative had returned with the head of the Hyuuga clan.

"Hokage-sama, to what do I owe the disturbance of my rest?" he said, in a tone that was both respectful and haughty at the same time.

The blonde turned and inclined her head politely to Hiashi, but did not lower it, quietly asserting that she was still the one in charge. "Hyuuga-san, I need to know if the Main Family's hand seal works with that seal too," she said, pointing at Kurotsuki's forehead.

A smile spread slowly over Hiashi's face as he realized the woman in the bed was the same one who had humiliated him in front of Neji months ago. "Of course, Hokage-sama," he said calmly. "Must the ANBU remain? This is a closely-guarded secret."

"Yes," she said immediately, "for everyone's safety."

"Very well," he said grudgingly. The Hyuuga put up a genjutsu to mask his hands.

"Wai-" was all Kurotsuki managed to say before the seal on her forehead glowed blood red. She screamed.

Naruto snapped awake and sat up in bed. Goosebumps covered his body and he shivered. All his hairs stood on end, and he had a creeping sensation of expecting pain. The blond rubbed his eyes and grabbed his black and orange jacket from the bedpost. Spring was coming soon, but the nights were still cold. He sprang out of bed and opened his window as the last of the night's rain fell from the sky. "Jeez, what's going on..." He leapt down onto the street and headed for the main gates of Konoha. "Anything been happening tonight, guys?"

The Chunnins sitting in the booth looked at each other and shrugged. "Nothing out of the ordinary," the woman said.

"Yeah, are you expecting something to happen, Naruto-kun?" the man next to her asked.

"I dunno," he muttered, "I've just got a bad feeling." Naruto shrugged. "I'm just going to go for a run." He dashed up the thick wall that encircled the village. "I'll see you guys when I make a lap."

He ran along the top of the wall, the tak tak of his feet and the sound of his breathing breaking the silence of the night. As he got to the hospital, the feeling of foreboding got stronger. And that was when his ears picked up the sound of a woman screaming. Just for a second, before it was muffled, and then disappeared. The young man furrowed his brow and leapt off the wall, clinging to the side of the hospital building. He followed his gut, until he was just below the window of a room where the shades were drawn and the lights were still on, despite the hour. He crept closer, and heard the screaming faintly as his head neared the edge of the silencing genjutsu. It stopped again.

A cloud of smoke appeared just above him. "Your presence is not needed here," a deep voice said.

He looked up into the dark eyeholes of the ANBU mask of the man that had appeared. "People that are screaming in a hospital should be treated, not muffled with genjutsu," he said angrily, creeping slightly higher.

The ANBU's foot lashed out and kicked at him. Just in time, Naruto took both hands off the hospital wall and blocked, but he skidded down the building a couple feet before the chakra in his feet held him to the vertical wall once more. "You need to leave."

"Alright..." he muttered. "But I'll be talking to Sakura-chan about this," he said, as threateningly as he could. The ANBU watched him silently for another moment before disappearing in another puff of smoke.

"Naruto."

He nearly fell off the building in surprise. "Kakashi-sensei?" The young man landed on the roof of the house near the hospital where his teacher was sitting. "What's going on in there?"

He sighed heavily and shook his head. A bit of rain flew from his silver hair. He'd been outside while the frigid rain was coming down. He only wore black pants and his sleeveless shirt, but the cold didn't seem to matter to him. "I don't know. It's Kurotsuki's room."

"Oh, yeah, Ino-chan said that she became a werewolf at the end of the Exam."

"Dear god, is that what the rumor is?" he snorted.

He shrugged. "You know how she gets. What are you doing here?"

"Keeping watch."

"For the ANBU to leave?"

"You don't need to be here too, Naruto. Go home," he said quietly.

"But if Kurotsuki's in there-"

"I said go home. There's nothing either of us could do right now." Kakashi turned his face away from his student, but kept his onyx eye trained on the window of her room.

His blue eyes stared at the shades drawn across the window as he gnawed on the skin of his thumb. "I'm telling Sakura-chan tomorrow. You should get some sleep, sensei. Didn't you just come back from a mission?"

Kakashi remained silent, still watching. Waiting.

"Goodnight, sensei." Naruto was generally pretty clueless, but he'd gotten the hint this time. He made his way back to the wall and finished his lap, then started the walk back to his small apartment. The uneasy feeling had faded a little, so he was headed back to bed, but he couldn't help but wonder what had been going on.

"Thank you, Hyuuga-san. You have been a great help," the Hokage said. "I am sorry to have disturbed your sleep."

He smiled back at her. "Not at all, Hokage-sama. If you are at all in need of my assistance again, I will be happy to oblige."

"Hyuuga-san, there will be no need to trouble you, any member of the Main Family will be able to activate that seal if need be," she reasoned.

"Please, I insist," he said quietly, but with an unmistakable commanding undertone. His malevolent smile silently proclaimed that he rather did enjoy his time in Ibiki's role as the interrogator.

Tsunade nodded once. "I shall inform you if I require your services. You may depart," she said with finality. An ANBU operative detached from the group in the room and escorted the head of the Hyuuga clan back to the compound where he lived. The Hokage surveyed the unconscious woman on the bed. Kurotsuki was breathing heavily, her breath wheezing through her throat, torn up from all the screaming. The symbols on her forehead had returned to black, now that the hand seal was no longer in effect. "Ibiki-san is right, she's a stubborn one." There had been a few things that she had learned.

The researchers used to use the seal to keep the vessel in line while they learned how to talk to the Spirit and control Her. But in Kurotsuki's case, she happened to be more compatible with the Spirit than most, and they were able to communicate almost immediately. As a child, Kurotsuki was convinced by the Spirit that letting Her take over, just for a couple hours, would be fair. Since if they were sharing the same body, they should spend equal time controlling it. Given this opportunity, the Spirit had used her vessel to raze the entire town of Kougyoku, sending so much chakra running amok in the child's body that she'd repressed all the memories of that time until now, the first time the seal had been used in thirteen years. The next hour was spent alternating between Tsudane asking questions and Hiashi activating the seal when she refused to reply. They'd found out that whenever a Bijuu was captured, the Spirit sent the silver-haired woman on a self-harming spree, some of which Kakashi had witnessed. (Tsunade ground her teeth at this, since he'd not once reported this to her.) However, they were still no closer to figuring out who had trained her after she left Kougyoku, but the big mystery of Fuyuuno Kurotsuki was finally coming into the light.

The black-haired woman finally put down her brush and blew gently on the drying ink. Shizune's hand was cramping from all the speed-writing she had just done, taking down what the Hokage was saying about what she'd learned about Fuyuuno Kurotsuki earlier that night. Frankly, it all sounded ridiculous, but Morino Ibiki had no reason to lie about any of it.

"Thanks, Shizune," she said exhaustedly. The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon. "Brief me about the Kougyoku files after I get some sleep," she said, rising from her desk and trudging out the door.

"Yes, Tsunade-sama." She rose and headed down to the rooms with all the old mission files, feeding some chakra to the door to open it. Shizune searched through the stacks, and, many dusty sneezes later, she pulled out a thin folder with just a few pages inside, with a special note that the payment of the mission had been received in cut rubies. She tucked the folder under her arm and proceeded to locate the second file relating to Kurotsuki's story. Pulling another file from the shelves, she found the report of the father and son of the Rubimura family was within, with the description of a girl they had seen flee from the village. Skim reading quickly, she found that the file was closed since the town was destroyed and the girl was presumed dead in the wilderness in the middle of winter. Shizune signed out the files on the list by the door and headed back up to her office, joined to the Hokage's. With a sigh, she brewed herself another cup of black tea and sat down to read...

...

On a cold winter night, Rubimura Saigo and his son, Kenji, were returning to Kougyoku. The snow had just stopped for the night, but that left a 6-inch layer of white fluff on the ground that they had to trudge through to get home.

"You did good, boy," Saigo said gruffly. He didn't often have words of praise for his son, but Kenji had helped his father sell out on his very first trading trip at just 12 years old. The boy's brown hair was just starting to get red streaks from the sunlight. It was a trait special to the Rubimura family, and a point of pride that even their hair matched the colour of the rubies that was their town's livelihood.

Kenji smiled. "Thanks, Dad." He paused for a couple breaths and continued to plough through the snow on the ground with the large knapsack on his back. Thankfully, it was lighter than when they had left a couple days ago, seeing as all the rubies were sold. "Do you think Mom will be up?"

Saigo shrugged. "I always tell her not to wait, because this darn snow always ruins the travel plans." He smiled, "It would be nice to see her though." Saigo was a rough, outdoorsy type of man, but the one thing that had softened him was meeting his wife and having a son. Other than that, he would have been perfectly content to spend his life travelling to and from his trading spots.

"Hey Dad, did you notice those two ninjas from Konoha at the research facility, just before we left?" Kenji asked excitedly. "I'd want to become a ninja; that would be so cool."

He spat into the snow on the side of the path. "Those damn researchers. They've been doing shady things for years in that building of theirs. In the middle of the night, when I used to come back from my trips, I'd hear screaming coming from the building. And sometimes, when you walk by, all your hairs just stand on end. What's that energy stuff the use, chalk-something?"

"Chakra," his son answered immediately. His favourite possessions were his shinobi story books which he'd convinced his mother to buy for his birthdays.

"Whatever, that stuff makes your hairs stand on end." He shook his head. "I don't know what 'very important research' they're doing, but I don't like it." He slowed and stopped. "Kenji, stay here for a moment."

The boy turned to his father, puzzled. "What's wrong, Dad? I thought we were going home to see Mom?"

"Stay here," he said again. "You can usually see the lights from the town by now. And there's a funny smell in the air..." Saigo crept slowly down the path, keeping his eyes fixed in the direction of his home. "...No," he whispered.

"What is it?" Kenji found a burst of energy and ran towards where his father had just vanished from sight, behind a slight bend in the road. He stared at the scene before him.

Kougyoku was gone. All the small wooden houses were burned. Black charred sections of weathered wood sticking up out of the snow, marking where the walls of the houses had been. A couple sections of wall or roof had survived, still smoking. Blood dripped off of the eaves, looking black in the light of the full moon. Drip... drip... drip... the sound met his ears, reminding him of the sound of a washcloth being wrung out over a bowl of cold water, like his mother did when he was sick with a fever. "Mom? Mom!" His lanky legs carried him past the outer houses of the town, towards the centre of town. His mind blurred out the images of the dead villagers, either burned with their homes, or clawed and mauled by some sort of medium-sized animal in the streets.

"Kenji, come back!" his father shouted after him.

The brown-haired boy screeched to a halt at the edge of the town square as his foot made a slap against a pool of blood in the snow. A small figure was lying in the snow, the white powder melting a shape around the body. A large, swirling sphere of black, glowing red, hung above the chest of the girl, before shooting upwards to the full moon hanging in the sky. Chakra. The world dimmed for a brief moment, as the sphere expanded on its upward trajectory, blocking the moonlight.

The girl's eyes snapped open and she sprang to her feet. Her short silver hair, was matted with blood, her eyes glowing like the chakra and wide as saucers. The thin hospital gown that she had was soaked through with snow, showing an array of old bruises, bleeding cuts and fresh burns. Just as Saigo caught up with his son, she turned her back to them and sprinted out of the town square and into the woods, faster than he would have thought possible with the injuries she'd sustained.

...

Rubimura Saigo had found his wife dead in their home, and not a single survivor in the entire town. He'd reported an increasing feeling of unease as he approached the concrete research facility, but hadn't investigated and had made the trip to Konoha on foot, with his grieving son in tow.

The Genin team that was sent to find the girl had set out three weeks after the incident, and had taken another two to actually reach what used to be Kougyoku. Their Chunnin sensei had reported that the majority of the bodies had been scavenged by the wildlife in the area, and the concrete building's lower floors had collapsed in on themselves. An alert had been circulated to the nearby villages with the girl's description, but when two months had passed without a single sighting, she was presumed dead and the mission was marked as closed.

Shizune closed that file and pushed it aside, rubbing her eyes. At least it all seems to be somewhat true. She picked up the other file of the mission paid in rubies and flipped it open. Her eyes widened and she stood up, knocking over her chair and nearly dropping the file on her way out the door. The assistant dashed up the stairs and cringed as she knocked loudly on the Hokage's door.

A very sleepy and irritated "What NOW," came from inside.

"My deepest apologies, Tsunade-sama. I thought you should know at once." Shizune held up the first page of the file, which contained all the basic information, such as rank, payment, and shinobi hired. "The person who's been training Fuyuuno Kurotsuki all these years is Uchiha Itachi."

"What?"

"Thirteen years ago, Hyuuga Hizashi and Uchiha Itachi were sent to Kougyoku to protect a girl." She flipped a page. "There's no report in the file of them giving blood to her, but I wouldn't be surprised if the clans decided to hush it up. Hizashi-san died in the Hyuuga-Kumogakure incident shortly after, and Itachi vanished after the Uchiha massacre five years after that." She flipped another page. "It all matches. The Hyuuga weren't concerned about Hizashi's blood because his seal was supposed to have taken care of it. Itachi must not have said anything to the clan to protect her, and must have gone to find her after Kougyoku was destroyed. You know how he always seemed to know things he shouldn't. Apart from the Rubimura father and son, who have no reason to go back, Itachi is the only person left who knows about the place before it was blown to pieces."

Tsunade's expression was grim. "Execute her."

A/N: Here's to hoping that the big reveal lives up to everyone's expectations. I hope it wasn't too confusing, since bolded words are showing up much less clearly than they used to (so I switched to a bunch of capitalizations). I keep intending to narrow the focus of this story, but I keep getting distracted. Please let me know how you felt about this chapter, and have a good day/night wherever you are. ^_^