**If you would like to know why this hasn't been updated in like, 7 months, read below!**

Disclaimer: I do not own the Naruto characters nor the cover image of Itachi! I do own my characters however!

The Anachronism

Chapter IV: The Day She Forgot

"We're going to the library!"

Itachi peered up from the book in his hands at the little blonde woman. Despite her proclamation the day prior that her texts would not help him understand where he was, they were rather enlightening. The current text – Pride and Prejudice – of which she had ripped from his stack the previous morning, informed him that wherever he was, was much more maudlin than his own world. Despite this, however, he had found some solace in Mr. Darcy's intelligence, and respected Ms. Bennett for her strength.

Nadeshiko blanched at the sight of the book in his hands. Hadn't she hid them yesterday? I can't believe he's actually reading that! She inwardly cried in embarrassment. Preoccupied by her discomfort, Nadeshiko nearly missed the mysterious man's response.

"The library?" Itachi echoed. He set the Jane Austen book down, causing Nadeshiko to breathe in relief.

"That's right!" She responded proudly, strutting into the living room, heels clicking against the hardwood floors. "I told you yesterday that reading my books won't help much. But maybe researching at the library will be helpful!"

Nadeshiko didn't want to admit that she also didn't really trust him to be alone in her apartment. Though she desired to help the man and he appeared helpless enough to her untrained eyes, he was still a stranger. For all she knew, he could be playing her. But, she thought carefully. That still doesn't explain his predicament. Dangerous criminal, helpless civilian, or whatever he was, that doesn't change the facts.

And the facts still stand that he was left bloody and unconscious in her living room, on the fourth floor nonetheless, and confused about it himself upon waking. Amnesia, she'd guessed, although more severe than she'd ever heard of it.

No, he could have been anyone before Friday night. But there was no mistaking the one flicker of pure confusion she'd seen in his face that night. That, at the very least, she knew to be true: he was lost. And, for better or for worse, Nadeshiko could not turn down someone in need, no matter what it may cost her.

Realizing she'd become lost in thought, Nadeshiko blinked and refocused on Itachi, who had gone back to reading after she'd begun to space out. She looked at him in unmasked horror and reached out to snatch the book away. He swiftly dodged and continued to read.

"I told you," the little blonde fumed. "These books won't help you!" She pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest. However, despite her attempts at anger, Nadeshiko never seemed to appear more than a defiant child. She cursed her genetics for her young face.

Surprisingly, Itachi flipped to the next page and thoughtfully placed it on the coffee table. He stood and left wordlessly through the doorway toward the kitchen. All the while, Nadeshiko eyed him curiously, her irritation melting quickly. He returned with a jacket newly purchased during their shopping trip yesterday and slipped his arms through the sleeves. Coal eyes looked at her with the same bored, apathetic expression she'd become accustomed to these past three days.

He nodded toward her, earning a confused expression from the blonde. In his smooth voice, he asked, "You wanted to show me to the library?"

Instantly, Nadeshiko's face lit up. Like most actions made by the girl, Itachi couldn't understand her happiness toward him or the sudden switch in her mood. Konan had not been like this, as I remember, Itachi thought, although his memory of the blue haired kunoichi was slowly fading. Aside from her, his interactions with females was sparing. The only other woman that he could say with certainty had shown him any sort of similar expression as the petite blonde was his mother.

An image of Mikoto, smiling pleasantly even in the face of her death by her eldest son, resonated in Itachi's mind. After years of playing cold and heartless, the Uchiha fought back urge to shudder, especially under the watchful eyes of the girl.

But that had been long ago.

"Right!" the blonde woman cheered, slinging her purse over her shoulder and removing Itachi from his thoughts. "Let's go then!"

However, as she stepped toward the door, realization of the current situation washed over her. Her leaving her apartment. With a guy. She shuddered at the thought of Megumi or another of the tenants on the floor seeing them. Her face flushed red and her hands flew to her cheeks. I don't even want to think of it! I don't want to know what they would say if they saw us, what they would think is going on between the two of us! Not to mention, if anyone learned that she was housing this guy, she'd be in a lot of trouble. The apartment, due to its small size, was listed specifically for one by the university. If they learned about Itachi, they could potentially evict her even though he's most likely not a student of the college.

Itachi stood quietly behind her, although his patience was beginning to wear. Nadeshiko must have noticed how odd it must have looked to have frozen as she did and spun around to face the man. "Don't move, okay?"

Itachi didn't respond, but Nadeshiko was already peeking her head out the door. She peered down the hall that went toward the elevator. No one. She turned her head to peer down the other hall toward more rooms. No one. For good measure, she peered toward the elevator again, but still there was no sign of anyone. She sighed in relief and faced Itachi. Though he appeared apathetic, she could only imagine what he was thinking right now.

What have I gotten myself into, the dark haired man thought with an internal sigh.

"Let's go!" Nadeshiko repeated, speeding down the hallway much to Itachi's surprise. He couldn't figure out her sudden paranoia; though, to be fair, there was much he didn't understand about the woman.

The sooner I figure out my situation, the better. Although he technically didn't mind Nadeshiko's presence, he couldn't remember the last time he'd had company such as hers before. It was draining in a way that no mission ever was; physically, but mostly emotionally and mentally. While he'd lived in close quarters with the other Akatsuki members, none of them were quite as readily available or chatty or bubbly as the blonde. The closest to her was probably Kisame, but even that wasn't comparable at all. He was his partner, and he knew Itachi's limits when it came to small talk and communication. Nadeshiko, in his eyes, was childlike, innocent, unscathed by the horrors of the world. At least, unscathed by what his world had to offer him. And if she knew the things I'd done, he thought, reaching the elevator just behind her. Again, his mother's smiling face appeared in his head. Itachi's jaw tightened, if ever so slightly.

Nadeshiko mashed her thumb into the DOWN button and spun to grin at Itachi. "It's only about a ten minutes' walk from here, so we'll be there in no time!" Itachi nodded curtly and averted his eyes to the lights flashing above the elevator doors, indicating the floors it was currently on. Nadeshiko, sensing a new coldness in his posture, dropped her smile and meekly turned away from him, wondering if she'd done something to set him off.

She would never look at me like that again.

xXxXxXx

Just as Nadeshiko said, their walk to the library was quick.

However, if she was being honest, it may as well have been a 3 hour walk instead.

After noticing a slight air of coldness upon leaving her room, Nadeshiko refrained from talking the entire walk to the library. Considering he seemed to tire of her antics between Friday night and Saturday, she worried that her personality was too much for the quiet Uchiha.

I'm just trying to be friendly and helpful… she thought to herself, stealing a glance up at the now apathetic Uchiha. Whew. At least he didn't look as dark as he had in the hallway. Still... Maybe he would prefer being left to himself more, and not have me so readily available? Which would be an easy fix, considering that at the start of the week, Nadeshiko would be back in her lectures and courses and clinical work and university friends. Itachi would have all the free time in the world to figure out his situation without having her looming over his shoulder. She smiled and nodded to herself, reasoning that everything would work out as they should. And if he ever is to need me, I'll be there!

Abruptly, the blonde halted, causing Itachi to pause a few steps behind her. Before them stood a massive building at least three floors tall. Watching Itachi eye the building, she grinned proudly.

"This is our university library!" she introduced, outstretching her arm toward it. "If there is anywhere around here where one can do loads of researching, it is here!" Much, much better than her meager library of romance novels and nursing texts can provide, she wanted to add. But she bit her tongue, not wanting to irritate the man.

Itachi nodded, taking in the vastness of the building that was so unlike any he had seen where he was from. As Nadeshiko practically skipped into the library, he followed quietly behind her. While the first floor was filled primarily with newspapers, information desks, and a coffee shop addition, the second and third floor proved to have a wide collection. Book shelf upon book shelf, filled to absolute capacity with more books than he'd ever seen in his life. Itachi wondered, as Nadeshiko set her purse down on an empty table away from the staircase, if he'd ever be able to read them all.

Examining the dark haired man's face, Nadeshiko teased, "See? Much better than what I have to offer!" But Itachi wasn't listening. He was too concerned with figuring out where to start. At least with the girl's collection, there was a pretty clear start and end to the books. Here, it was endless. Infinity, it seemed.

"Where do I begin?" he found himself saying, wondering how he was supposed to figure out where he was and how to get back where he belonged with so many books surrounding him. And this was only the second floor!

That was when the rogue ninja was reintroduced to the laptop. He remembered the one Nadeshiko had pulled out, but now he was being taught how to use it. Or, well, a part of it. The blonde indicated which icon he had to press, which would open a search engine for him to search keywords related to what he was looking for. As an example, Nadeshiko searched "puppies" and thousands of articles, newsclippings, books, novels, and recordings showed up on the screen.

"Typically," she began when she realized even this looked a bit overwhelming. "You would input a couple of keywords to narrow the search field so that you don't get thousands of options. But that's basically how it works! Then, you just check to see that you can either print the article or locate the book or recording from one of the shelves here –" She pointed to a four digit letter-and-numbers code. "And that's it! If you ever need help and I'm not here, just go to the first floor and any of the librarians would be happy to help you. Does that make sense?"

For the most part? Not really. But Itachi would never admit that. So he just nodded and averted his gaze to the computer screen while the blonde beamed and skipped back to the table across the room.

When he saw her plop down in her chair and pull out a notebook, pen, and one of her smaller nursing texts, he began typing.

Konohagakure. He waited patiently. Unlike Nadeshiko's puppy search, this provided much less options, though none of them were exactly what he was looking for. Itachi deleted the search and tried again.

Akatsuki. Again, Itachi waited, and peered up casually to see Nadeshiko on the portable phone device he'd seen her use countless times. Did she look paler for some reason? However, his attention refocused to the computer screen. This time, although there were many more results than with Konohagakure, they also didn't seem to match what he was looking for.

The dark haired man sighed. He was going to have to start a lot simpler than that, clearly, if he wanted any information about his current whereabouts, and where he should be. Maybe…"ninja"? "Shinobi"?

However, just as he was about to try again, a streak of blonde flew through his periphery and Itachi peered up in time to see Nadeshiko booking it down the winding stairs and a middle-age woman calling behind her, "No running in the library!" He raised an eyebrow and moved to walk toward the stairs to see where she was going in such a hurry when a folded piece of paper on the table she had just been sitting at caught his eye. Sauntering toward it, he opened it to reveal the scrawled message, "Forgot I had a thing to do today! Be back soon!" and a crudely done doodle of what he guessed was supposed to be her, smiling and waving.

He sighed. What an odd girl, he thought, retracing his steps back toward his computer, determined in his temporary solitude to get some sort of lead on his situation.

And at the same time as he did this, Nadeshiko sprinted uphill toward her building and her car, eyes wide and fearful, throat dry, cheeks stained with salty tears, and her phone in hand, opened to the text, Of all things… how could you forget?

To start off, I would like to apologize for the shorter-than-normal update. Most of my chapters thus far had nearly hit 3,000 words and this is… not nearly that, and I am so sorry about that. But what I'm sure many more of you are wondering about is my over half a year hiatus.

While this really is no excuse, it is the truth: in writing this story, I had written many chapters prior to posting the story here. Typically, I get busy with life so I wanted to have a bit of a buffer so that I would be able to post even in times when I was busy. If I remember correctly, I had been in the middle of writing Chapter 6 by the time I'd last posted. And then, the unthinkable happened. My laptop completely crashed and wiped this story and all of my other ones clean from my hard drive. I did everything to get them back and, when I was not successful, was completely discouraged from writing. I told myself time and time again that I would try to work on this again, but I was so upset about all my work being erased that I had little desire to try. Even now, I'm a bit frustrated because this chapter is not nearly as good as I would like it to be, or how it had been the first time I wrote it.

But I digress. The continued support from you guys – your reviews, favorites, messages – has willed me to try again with this. I'm going to really try and keep up with this because I've been brainstorming a lot, to the point where the new ideas I have for this story are infinitely better than what I had originally been thinking for the story. So for those of you who didn't lose hope, thank you so much for believing in me! And as always, review/favorite/follow if you enjoyed and I hope to get the next chapter out much, much sooner than this one! Thank you!