A/N: Dear and Dragon: OMG! You guys never reviewed for the previous chapters, so I didn't know I had you two readers Oo First of all, thank you for supporting this fic! I really appreciate your reviewing! And I will do my best to write to your satisfaction for all the upcoming chapters! salutes

CHAPTER 14: Conspiracies in the Night

Thump.

Thump.

...CRASH.

Sakura woke up with a jolt and opened her mouth to scream, only to to have a hand clamp tightly over her mouth a split second later, cutting her off. Scared out of her wits, she stared horrifyingly at her attacker and saw a pair of sinister black orbs staring back at her in the darkness...

...Wait a minute.

That pair of black eyes looked oddly familiar.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could faintly make out the spikey black hair of a familiar figure. "Sa...Sasuke...?" She asked hesistantly.

Her heart was still beating fast, but for an entirely different reason now. She hadn't noticed how close he was to her, with those intense dark eyes boring straight into her soul, and his lips a mere few inches away from hers...

Sasuke put a finger to his lips to demand silence, then beckoned her to follow.

Pulse racing, she excitedly followed the black haired boy out the window, pausing to wince at the huge crack in one of the panes, with a pebble still lodged in it. The wince deepened into a scowl as she climbed down the window and realized that Naruto was there waiting for her as well.

"Sakura-chan!" Naruto greeted her loudly with his typical grin.

"Shhh!" The pink-haired girl hissed back. "Not so loud! My parents will kill me if they find me up this late!" Though I wouldn't mind being grounded if it means I get to spend the night with Sasuke...

"Enough of this." Sasuke cut in. "Let's get going. We still need to get one more person."

Thump.

Thump.

...Thump.

"Aaaaghh what is it this time?" The boy on the bed grumbled. He'd been unsuccessfully trying to fall back to sleep ever since he'd woke up from a rather disturbing dream of having lost to Asuma at go within three moves, which was utterly unthinkable, not to mention physically impossible.

He shuddered, remembering how each time, his sensei's peices had increased more and more, until they were flooding the go board, cornering all of his movements, even though his mentor had only put down one chess peice at a time. He shook his head, trying to clear away the unsavory memory.

Focusing on the current situation at hand, he briefly entertained the idea of going to the window and yelling the crap out of whatever idiot was throwing stones at his window.

The idea was quickly dismissed as too troublesome as it required getting out of his comfortable position on the bed and having to walk all the way to the window. It's a good 5 feet away, for Chrissake. Go away and leave me the hell alone. Rolling over, he squinched his eyes shut, too lazy to even cover his ears with his hands to try and drown out the noise.

After awhile, the noise stopped. A short period of silence followed.

Just as he started to relax and doze off, he heard several ill-concealed whispers coming from below, followed by some scrabbling noises made by someone obviously trying to climb up to his window.

He groaned inwardly and scooted a little bit closer to the edge of the bed, hoping whoever the hell appeared might mistake him for a lump on the mattress and leave him in peace. Considering the invader of his room, his plan just might have actually worked, if he hadn't scooted a little too near the edge and ended up falling off the bed with a loud THUMP.

"Ow." He muttered dejectedly, sitting up and rubbing the back of his head. He felt a small lump starting to rise and muttered a couple of incoherent curses.

"Shikamaru!" Naruto whipped around torwards the direction of the sound. "Get yer lazy ass over here!"

"It doesn't look like I have a choice now, does it?" Shikamaru retorted.

"Just get over here already!" Naruto exclaimed impatiently. "Sasuke's got some kinda important thing or whatever that he wants to show us."

Grumbling tiredly and complaining all the way, Shikamaru reluctantly followed the hyperactive boy out the window.

A pair of yellow eyes roamed over the outlines of the village, hungry, thirsting, insatiable.

"Soon," a deep, gravelly voice rasped out. Those in its prescence shivered at the frigidity of its tone. There was no forgiveness in this relentless voice, no hint of mercy. To get what it wanted, it would destroy anything and everything in its way.

"Soon, this village, and all of the foolish inhabitants in it, will be mine."

"I, Orochimaru, have returned."

Members of the Anbu squad stared blankly.

On the bed, sheets and pillows were impossibly tangled with human limbs into one insane knot of chaos. A leg was on the bed, while the other encircled one of the bedposts. Torso was half draped across the bed and the rest on the floor, while one arm rested at an odd angle on a nearby bedstand. The other arm encircled one of the four-poster bed's wooden legs. The head was completely hidden--it was under the bed.

Oblivious to her surroundings and to her watchers, the girl from the other world slept on soundly.

A/N: HAHAHA. You thought I was going to end this chapter on a serious note, huh? HUH? NO! AHAHAHGARHAHGAHARHAW--chokes and dies