Chapter IV: 'The Little Apocrypha'

"I have to give you some idea of the why of everything," Anko said. "You're probably thinking, 'How does it choose? Why did it have to pick the one thing in my mind that causes me so much pain?'" She laughed hollowly, and out in the dining room Neji heard Orochimaru moving around.

"We all have things in our heads, Neji. I mean, we're shinobi, we've seen and done things that would make a normal person's blood curdle…some more than others…" her eyes glazed over and her hand went up to her shoulder, rubbing over a certain spot on it. "Some of us have seen horrible things done to others, ones we've known…" she looked at Neji with those hollow eyes, and he shivered. "Ones we've loved."

"I thought I was under a genjutsu," Neji spat. "Or haven't you read the records?"

"Don't think I'm stupid, Hyuuga," Anko said. "You didn't react like someone under genjutsu. It would have been broken the moment you set foot in the ANBU holding facility; there are more nulling jutsu on that place than anywhere else in Fire Country. No, Neji, you kept fighting and screaming for him." She pitched her voice in a horrible impression of Neji's. " 'I'm not under genjutsu, you damn fools! Take me, kill me instead!' "

"Shut up!" Neji yelled. "Shut up, you don't know a damn thing!"

"Don't I, Neji?" Anko looked anxiously at the door, but all they heard was Orochimaru's restless pacing. "Don't you think that even after he deserted me, the village, his own fucking teammates who were the only family he had left—don't you think even after that I loved him still? It's hard for kids to get rid of their childhood crushes. Look…" she pulled her hair out of the clip and ran a hand through it. "What I'm getting at is, there's something deep in our minds, some fantasy or memory or something that we hide away for whatever reason. It's something our waking mind can't deal with. It's something we don't want to admit to ourselves."

"And this is manifested--?"

"The lake, you idiot." She scowled. "The lake's the thing that's doing it. Scholars come up with all these grand theories and all shinobi are to them are the guinea pigs and rats sent out to run their little theoretical, philosophical mazes. But don't you see? We come here and we all think that we're doing something grand and adventurous and in the spirit of science.

"Do you know," she said, "That in one of the deeper levels of the ANBU facility—the above-ground portion of which moves every week, in case you wanted to know, that's why we kept knocking you out and blindfolding you—in one of the deep levels, there are cells full of prisoners?"

"We were down deep enough."

"Deeper than you two. They weren't going to put anyone but Orochimaru himself in levels below you." She paused to listen, then continued. "But one of the levels is full of prisoners—shinobi of all ranks, citizens, prisoners of war, you see. And in that level, the worst interrogations are carried out—and also the autopsies…some of the bodies are still twitching, Neji, and that is a sight I don't think I'll be able to get out of my head as long as I live and breathe. We're none of us any better than the old snake, and at least he thought he had something in mind. See how far that got him.

"But they never tell anyone but the highest-ranking ANBU and the Hokage this. Because most people, Neji, don't want to know the whole fucking truth. They want a mirror held up to them; they want to see things that are within their realms of understanding, and when something arrives that they can't comprehend, they want to destroy it."

Neji stared at her. Her hair was in disarray, her clothes rumpled, and it was obvious she hadn't had a good night's sleep in weeks. What could her proselytizing be caused by? He wondered. Psychosis?

"Diagnosing us, are you?" she asked nastily. "Going to dig out some more panic pills and slip them in our water? Don't be in too much of a hurry to find some nice words to write in your report. You've only been through one easy ordeal."

"So the devil had pity on me?"

"What do you want me to say?" Anko said. "That a lake has been fucking with our heads all along? That it's a lake that sends us phantoms from our pasts? Do you want to know if the lake is plotting? I'll tell you exactly what it's plotting, Neji—abso-fuckin'-lutely nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing?

Anko smiled ruefully.

"Kakashi came up with the idea that if we all poured chakra into the lake, maybe it'd do something. I think he was bored." She laughed. "But for lack of anything better to do, we did it. We poured all our chakra into the lake—that was, oh, maybe two weeks ago now. We think the lake responded with a kind of counter-chakra, something that picked our brains and came up with a sort of mental tumor."

"Tumor?"

"Something that's sat in our heads and festered—weren't you listening? Whatever we've got in there that we don't want to let out, not ever. And for us, since we're around death, our visitors," she dropped her voice to a whisper on that last word, "Are people who have died. It started with Kakashi. We'd been here about two months, when all of a sudden he started locking himself in his room and speaking to us through the door, or only coming out but staying right near the door. We all thought he'd lost it—you know, a smart guy, but he's been through a hell of a lot, and sometimes you geniuses, you just snap—"

"I'm aware."

"Anyway, we'd all thought he'd lost it. He told us a bit of it through the locked door, but not everything by far. He was trying to work it all out, trying to figure out what it meant. You know what he was doing? You have to know."

"Chakra pulse calculations…"

"Right. He thought he was nuts too!" Anko giggled. "It went on about a week. We thought he'd gone completely mad—we could hear his voice, but also some noises we thought he was making. I've got my own ideas about why we couldn't hear Obito talking to him. We thought he was suffering a nervous breakdown. I gave him his medpack, and that was what had the panic pills, a whole team dosage, in it. But he wasn't using it for himself. He was trying it on someone else. One day we'd decided that if he didn't come out, we'd break down the door. And we did, and…"

"You found him."

"Yeah. But in the meantime, our own visitors had come, and we hadn't had a chance to tell him what we'd been experiencing."

Neji thought about this. It was all too much to process right now, but something was nagging at him. "Anko-san, you've had some experience with them. Tell me…will he—will the person who visited me today come back?"

"Yes and no."

"What does that mean?"

"He—this person will come back like nothing's happened. He won't know you tried to poison him, or that you pushed him off a cliff. He won't remember that he's been here before. If you follow the rules, he won't be aggressive—unless you want him to, of course, if that—"

"Anko-san."

"Sorry." She grinned sheepishly.

"What are the rules?"

"Depends."

"Anko-san!"

"What?"

"Stop wasting time!"

"All right!" Anko looked at him. "Tell me who he was."

"Itachi, you know the story."

"I know what ANBU wrote down."

Neji knew what she was asking him, swallowed, and looked away.

"It was the night of the eighth month stargazing festival," he said, "The year there was a spectacular meteor shower. Six years ago. I saw it through my cell window." He laughed hollowly. "Itachi was in the cell next to mine, but they had him drugged so he couldn't look out the window. But he would have been gone that very morning after I woke up…but I asked him to stay." Neji glared at the bandage he'd put on his knuckle where he'd punched through the tile.

"I wanted him to stay," he said softly. "I was selfish and wanted him to stay with me that night, so we could watch the meteor shower together. We'd watched some other years, but they had always been such fleeting moments. I wanted one night where it was just the two of us, no worries of discovery, no distractions…we'd been planning to go up over the Hokage monument. There's a clearing there we always met at. He wanted to leave and come back that night, but I told him he'd be safe in my room. He'd never been discovered before, and I'd always put a jutsu-lock on the door. But somehow he was found out—someone knew he was there, somehow, and they told Sasuke and he broke the jutsu-lock, and he was on Itachi too fast for him to get a genjutsu spun up. So it was my fault he was caught."

Just talking about it like this made a lump rise in his throat. "Sasuke…he was furious. He called me—"

"—just as much a betrayer as his brother." Anko nodded. "I get the idea. That trial was a joke though."

"A total farce."

Anko sighed, shifted her weight. "Anyway, these visitors…if you attack them, they come back, just as you remember them. But…changed. Obviously enough for you to—"

"Yes, changed." Neji didn't want to think about it. "Did Kakashi know as much as we do now before he…?"

"Most likely."

"Did he tell you anything?"

"No. I found a book in his room, The Little—"

"—Apocrypha?" Neji held out his hand. "I'd like to read it."

Anko handed it over, a slim scroll, old and tattered in places. Neji pocketed it.

"And what about Shizune?"

"Shizune!" Anko laughed. "Well, everyone's got their own way dealing with things. She's spent so much time around bureaucracy that she sticks to that out of habit. It's either that, admit she's nuts like the rest of us, or commit a crime."

"A crime?"

Anko grinned in that snakelike way again. "Divorce by ejection or conflagration, shall we say?"

Neji looked at her askance. "That's a morbid way to put it."

"We've done morbid things here, Neji. Get used to it. So do you have a plan for when he gets back?"

"No, I haven't…" The Hyuuga looked away. "I don't have any idea what I'll do. How do they get in though? We could put ninjutsu-locks on the doors, a genjutsu on the house—"

"Won't matter. We've tried, they just break it."

"Genjutsu?"

"Particularly violently."

"So why don't you all just leave?" Neji was growing impatient with them. What had happened to the strong jounin he'd known?

"Do you think it's just that easy? That we can just slip away between their arrivals?" Anko shrugged. "Even if we don't learn anything about the lake or them, we may learn something about ourselves."

"And what did Kakashi learn, then?"

"That in the end, he was much too weak."

Neji left her to have dinner with Orochimaru and wandered back to his room. As soon as he turned round he saw the red-and-black cloak on his bed and shuddered, picking it up and throwing it over the back of a chair. It had not been a dream; it was all too realy.

Pulling out a message scroll, he began writing his initial report, remarks on the condition of each person and the team as a whole. The little scroll he put aside on the table in his room, and he did not read it just yet. When he got to where he would have to mention the visitors, he paused.

Now I see why they didn't include it in their reports, he thought. How would it sound if we wrote 'the lake is manifesting people years dead'? So against his own judgment, he excluded them. I will mention them next time. Either way, the truth will come out when we return home with them in tow.

Finishing up the report, he rolled that and Kakashi's post-mortem report into the message tube and pulled out a third scroll. Unrolling it, he focused his chakra and made a series of hand seals, lightning-fast; a bird summon, a hawk, appeared in the center of the paper. Fastening the tube to its leg, Neji carried it to the window and let it go, watching it fly away. Rolling up the summon scroll, he tucked it back in its pocket and at last, picked up The Little Apocrypha.

It was the deposition and interrogation of the author, including log entries that he'd kept on the boat that had had the accident on the lake. Neji read it all; Yume spoke of a great fog descending on the area, but with little whirlpools in its gray covering, openings to the sky, It was in one of these, he said, that he saw the surface of the lake shift all around him (it remained calm in the vicinity of his boat) and grow into 'fantastic shapes' as he put it; he said, and this was apparently on record at the Administrative Tower in Mist, that the surface of the lake had formed a garden with shrubbery, arches, trees—but it wasn't a garden at the same time, as everything was made of water. And it was more the suggestion of a bush or a hedge, with no detail to it. And then, as he watched, the garden had collapsed into water again and then boiled up into the form of a giant infant, at least ten feet in height, terrible to behold.

Yume's interrogator had taken him off record several times, as Yume would not proceed until the Council of the Mist Village had announced if it believed him or not. At one point, the scroll noted that their session had lasted three hours, and they had discussed the man who had disappeared in front of Yume's eyes off the boat, a man named Kikuchi Mora, from Grass. Yume had sworn his interrogator to secrecy, and would only allow him to tell the council if they reversed their ruling on his mental state.

Also included in the scroll, toward the end, was a copy of the last page of a letter from Yume's interrogator to a friend of his in the Records division of the administration of the Grass Village, and apparently forwarded to Yume:

...absolutely unconscionable, this blockade of our knowledge into the incident. A bunch of doddering old fools, to be sure. I doubt your administration is much different; anxious to preserve their authority and not be seen as the laughingstock of the Villages and the Great Countries.

Bound as I am by oath, I can't reveal to you what Yume told me. The only reason they disregarded Yume's testimony was because he is in dissent with many of their decisions and they wish to make an example out of him, to show their village what happens when their orders are disobeyed. The Mizukage ought to censure them but we know he's getting on in years himself, and hasn't yet chosen a successor. He's probably worried it'll go to some militaristic idiot and wants to hold out for a better candidate, but until then he has to keep his seat safe. Either way, Yume's ability of observation is astounding and should be taken into account.

I have a few small favors to ask you, friend; Yume's partner in the incident, a Grass-nin by the name of Kikuchi Mora, disappeared, and Yume saw some rather spectacular things manifested after his disappearance. If you can please send me copies of:

i), Kikuchi's biography, especially details of his childhood if you have them,

ii)Everything you know of his family or clan, facts and dates,

iii)the topography of the place in your country where he was brought up.

I know you thought my interpretation of events fantastic and borderline insanity, but please at least humor me. I still believe the source of the things Yume saw to have been Kikuchi—or rather, Kikuchi's mind. Madness, I know, nonetheless...we have been friends through many things, and I wish us to remain that way.

Yours,

R.

Neji put the scroll away and looked out the window. There was a mist forming from over the lake, and it drifted past in little tufts. The sun turned it golden.

There was a knock on the door.

"Neji? Can I come in?"

Still staring out the window, Neji called, "Come in, it's open."

Tsunade pressed her chakra into the seal on Sasuke's shoulder, letting it spread out to every corner and character of the jutsu that kept the Heaven mark in place. Under her capable hands, Sasuke shivered. He'd never be used to the feeling of another's chakra flooding his body, he didn't think.

Going character by character, Tsunade checked over the seal, closing any holes the corrosive power of the seal had created with a deft patch. Something seemed off, though—more power was leaking through than usual, and with a start she realized that it was because Kakashi's seal, the original seal on this, was gone. That could only mean one thing; Kakashi was dead.

Biting her lip, Tsunade patched up the rest of the holes, checked her handiwork, and pulled her chakra out. "That seal is fine," she said, keeping her voice calm. "Now I'm going to check the other one."

Parting the back of his hair, she found a thin line of characters, and followed it up to where it intersected another line of characters that went across the width of his skull. Putting two fingers at that juncture, she pressed chakra into that as well.

A few minutes later, she pulled out, having sealed up any holes. It was disconcerting, being so close to what was left of Orochimaru's consciousness; it was such a familiar feeling, but so different at the same time. She could almost feel him brooding in the slumber he would never wake from again. "Both the seals are fine," she said. "You shouldn't be having any more problems, but come to me if some crop up."

She did not tell him about the absence of Kakashi's seal. The visual component had been covered by the amalgam of things she'd put on his shoulder to regulate the chakra flow and make sure he didn't access all of its power at once again, so he wouldn't have noticed that way. Watching him leave, she wondered, What is going on at that lake? Neji's report is due in tonight or tomorrow.

Sitting at her desk again, she busied herself with paperwork, trying to make herself forget.