Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or any of its characters.

CLAIMER: I DO OWN SARA AND ALL RIGHTS TO HER.

Italics: thought or emphasis

Bold: dream or flashback

SASUKE'S POINT OF VIEW

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Chapter Two: Family

The next person to knock on my door was Tsunade. Which was odd, considering it was a month after Kakashi left. He usually didn't leave me alone that long.

I was used to everyone else leaving me alone now. Usually, it would be Sakura I'd be hearing from every other day. However, I think my impending silence and ever colder bitterness discouraged everybody from socialization. Not that I minded. But I did answer the door for Tsunade…

She nodded at me as she usually did and entered without invitation. I closed the door after her. "Can I help you?" I asked as I followed her into the living room. She knew she wasn't coming in my house without having some questions to answer.

"No, vise versa," she answered. I raised an eyebrow. That was my version of 'explain.' "I'm here to inform you of your inheritance," she continued. Now I was really confused.

"Inheritance?" I pressed. "From who?" She looked at me like I should know. Well, how should I? I didn't have family, and none of my friends would put me in a will.

"Yes," she confirmed. She fished a piece of paper. "From an Aranya. Huh. No second name, just 'Aranya.'" She seemed puzzled by this herself. My face turned stoic. A misunderstanding. That's what brought my first visitor in a month.

"Must be a misunderstanding. I don't know an 'Aranya.'" With that, I stood up. Strange. I didn't remember sitting down.

I did that often, ever since…that night. Did things so automatically that I didn't remember doing them. I didn't complain. The faster time passed, the better. That was all I asked from life now: the speed of time. Free time was dreaded, and the slow passing was almost worse. It was never good to have time to think.

"No, it isn't a mistake," she replied, distracting me from my train of thought. "It says 'to my nephew, Uchiha Sasuke, the last member of the Uchiha Clan, I give everything.'"

My brow creased. "That's…strange. To say the least. So…this 'Aranya' somehow knew me and considered me her nephew, though I have no idea who she is."

Tsunade looked up at me with a 'like I know more than you do' look. "Apparently."

That didn't ease my puzzlement.

"How old was she? How did she die?" Maybe that would ring a bell. She looked back at the sheet of paper.

"Hm, she was 83 when she died of natural causes. Heart attack." My brow creased further. No bells.

"…How much is 'everything'?" I finally asked. She looked closer at the paper.

"A large estate and 25,000,000 yen." I raised my eyebrows—this time in surprise.

"…That's a lot to accept, considering I didn't know an 'Aranya.'" Tsunade scowled, beginning to get annoyed, as I could see.

"Uchiha, just accept it for now. We'll investigate. If something shows up, we'll let you know. I have other business to attend to." With that, she handed me the woman's will and walked out of the house, leaving me with many questions.

So I sat back down and began reading. I had a certain feeling I couldn't quite recognize. It'd been so long since I'd felt emotion, I paused to put my finger on it. …Curiosity. That was it. Wow, I thought. I must have been pretty out of it to forget something so basic. Well, there was no "must have been" to it. It was "must be." I was still as mindless as the day after it happened. As far as I could see, that wasn't going to change. It scared me, somewhat. To know that this was how I would be the rest of my life: praying for time to pass faster, avoiding thinking at all, spending my days in silence, and living as if on auto-pilot. It disturbed me mostly because I knew my fox would have hated it…

I focused on reading before any more of the disturbing reminders of reality could float by my mind.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am not dead. I am lost. I do not know where, you will never know where. When it is assumed I am dead, to my nephew, Uchiha Sasuke, the last member of the Uchiha Clan, I give everything.

Short will. Strange. You'd think an old woman's will would be all about life lessons, people she'd loved, all that emotional, sappy crap. But it only increased my curiosity. What could she mean "I am lost?" What a strange thing to put in a will.

The fact that she called me family was also still a mystery. I didn't have family…

I lay on my side on the couch, knowing now the pain was inevitable. My mind would wander onto forbidden territory no matter how hard I tried to escape it. I could feel my face twisted in agony and my eyes tortured as I sank into my thoughts.

My family is dead. Itachi took my parents, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, and everything that was my life…

But death took my husband. Death took my daughter. Just then, the images that never seemed to be erased completely planted themselves in my mind again.

The day I found out, I'd busted into Tsunade's office…to find my daughter's body…split in half down the chest. Doctors of the village probed at her insides, her pale skin was almost blue, and there were cuts, bruises and bites all over her small body… But worst of all were her eyes, tilted towards me, wide open. Empty blue eyes sunken into what looked like a skull with bluish rubber stretched over it, topped with a straw-like mess of blonde hair ripped into uneven segments. My daughter's dead eyes stared up at me, boring into my mind, my memory, my sanity… There was a tarp next to her wrapping something the size of a body…

I had snapped. I had ripped off the tarp only to find a worse scene. My husband was torn to pieces, ravaged by what seemed like an animal. His eyes were the same empty blue as they stared into mine, and I froze… I don't know what happened after that, but according to Kakashi, I clung to his body. I refused to believe he was dead, despite that I clung to his bluish, cold, bloodied body. I shook with soundless sobs, frozen in agony. That I remember. The agony. I remained like that for almost a full day before I myself was so lifeless that I could be pried from my husband's corpse.

I let my grief press me into blackness now, the tears on my cheeks the only thing that warmed my heartless shell. That's what I was without Naruto, without Sara. I was a heartless corpse, just as they were. Walking dead, soulless zombie. That's what I had become. And that I would always be.

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The estate was indeed huge. I stood before it the next day, after I woke from my anguished blackness. The giant mansion was very old and crawling with vines. It was obvious no one had taken care of it when the old woman passed. I could tell it was very beautiful, though. It was wooden with brick walls lining the grounds. It was two-story with a front deck. On top of said deck was a white set of patio furniture: two chairs and a table. Well, they used to be white. Now they were nearly consumed by green algae.

I could tell the gardens had once been beautiful. There were very pretty flowers in all of them, but they were either wildly overtaking the garden, barely peaking from under their conquerors, or climbing up the walls of the house. She had been a very colorful woman, I decided. The flowers were all different colors and styles, and most of the gardens looked more like experiments than organized presentations.

So this was now mine. I felt a strange sense that this may have been something like mine and Naruto's house if we had ever gotten old enough to retire to experimental gardens and time on front decks. Though you would think it was creepy, it had an even creepier sense of "home." I felt like I was welcome here, welcome to explore the mystery.

I felt like the house, or maybe Aranya's spirit…was urging me to find her. The house made me more confident in the suspicion that she was indeed "lost" and not dead.

Or maybe…maybe my subconscious clung to the hope that not all I could possibly care for was dead. Maybe the whole purpose of this "Aranya" was to give me a new reason to live, or at least remind me of a few emotions I'd lost.

But I didn't want to think of it that way. I wouldn't go in the house today. I'd solved the mystery of what it looked like. I wanted to explore my curiosity in measured doses, prolong it for as long as possible.

Something inside me didn't want me to be mindless. Maybe it was Naruto.

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25,000,000 yen is about $207,452.63 in US dollars.

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Kind of an eventless chapter, but it does reveal more of Naru's and Sara's death…and Sasu's pain. :( R&R please.

Next Chapter: What clues to this "Aranya" lie in the mysterious, home-y mansion? Or better yet, what clues to her mysterious "death?"