"Did you find it?"...no reply. And the silence dragged on. Water. Dripping.
Screams. Chains. Rattling. Confusion. Pain.
A voice: "I said, did you find it?"
This time a reply: "yes."
Another echoed scream…and faint whispering. A voice, talking loudly over the noise: "And did you dispose of them correctly?"
Abrupt silence. A voice, loyally dead: "Yes, and we stayed around to make sure the right people found them."
Crying, echoing down the long corridor…wails and moans…tears falling, water dripping,
A laugh, shrill and cold: "Listen to them…we soon will bring more to join the fun, won't we?"
Another lifeless voice spoke up, among the wails and screeches: "You do not wish for us to kill them?"
Silence. The screaming stopped. Water dripped. A voice, low: "Find them, all of them…and bring them here."
"-But we do not have enough strength to lure them all…and they'd escape if we took them by force. What with the extras?"
The main voice, back in control, the screaming was still absent: "Good question...we cannot lure them all here, but now, how to cast a difference between who is needed, and who isn't?"...
The question hung, unanswered in the air.
Drip…..drip……drip….still no screams.
A voice, drained of all but little emotion: "The two known hosts are needed."
"As for the others?": a voice asked.
A single moan; more sobbing, a plea: "stop! Please stop!"
"Bring everyone you can to me. We know the two hosts are needed. As for anybody else, if they are strong enough to withstand our…tests, then so be it."
"And if they can't stand it?"
The leader did not reply. Finally, light illuminated the shabby stone chamber. The faces of no less than thirteen ninja were cast into a dim candlelight.
A voice, one who still had personality, one full of lonely hatred and severe angst; one of pain and knowledge, spoke up, "We bring everybody back here, and then those who cannot stand our requirements…
"We kill them." He finished.
Naruto woke up, panting. He didn't sit up, for the room was spinning around him. He tried to swallow. This was no nightmare, he thought matter-of-factly.
Turning over on his side, he glanced out his window. Thankfully, the world had decided to slow its spinning and he could now see shapes and lines with more clarity.
There was a cold sweat on his forehead, and as he lay there, he tried to piece his jumbled dream back together.
Hours of endless turmoil called the sun to rise, but the pale sunshine of a new day didn't help Naruto figure out the meaning any faster. And he didn't want to present himself to Tsunade without some sort of inference as to what it meant.
The birds had just started chirping when Naruto came up with one thing: The voices wanted to bring people back to their lair and kill the ones who couldn't pass some sort of "test."
This doesn't help…Naruto thought sadly, they never said if it was a written test or a life-or-death test or what it was…
The logical part of him, buried deep down in the dusty corners of his mind, chimed in, the people screaming surely wouldn't sound like that if it was a written test…
Happily, Naruto marked that off his mental list.
A few minutes passed in silence. And a thought occurred to him as he laid there.
Most people only scream like that if they were being tortured.
And with that, another worry crossed his mind, is that what they're going to do to us when they catch us?
Sitting up lightly, finally, after many hours, he was able to breathe correctly; Naruto took a huge, deep breath and held it.
Releasing it, he thought, those moans were like the ones I heard when I grabbed that thing. Casting a dirty glance at the little crystalline tear on his nightstand, he watched it glow an electric blue before it swiftly went back to its pretty transparent sheen.
Picking it up, a strange tingle went through his arm; it made him feel like he was flying. And he had no idea what that was like. It was a soaring sensation; like standing on something immensely tall and jumping off…letting your stomach (and probably a lot of other things) rise up to your throat…the wind rushing through your hair—
Naruto was suddenly hit with a realization, "They're gonna kill us!"
In the silence that followed, Naruto wondered how long he'd better wait until he told somebody. Something told him he should tell now, but another, more persuasive part told him to hold on…he was forgetting something important.
Laying the tear back on the stand, Naruto began to mumble to himself, "So these people are going to capture us…and if we can't pass their test, they kill us. No biggie. Okay…" He stood up and paced around the room.
"And these tests probably involve torture, because those people…they were screaming…and it sounded an awful like when I touched that tear for the first time. Maybe they have to touch tears too! But then where are these tears coming from? And who would make them? And who would want to capture us?" Naruto pondered this as he walked around in circles in his room.
The answer came to him, as obvious as the morning sunlight that was streaming through his window.
"The Akatsuki."
Standing at his window, the light breeze blowing through and ruffling his hair, Naruto thought through his dream once more.
The Akatsuki want to capture us…and they're going to test us and kill whoever doesn't pass the test.
Somehow, Naruto knew all along that this was going to happen. From the first dream, the one of fire and dying, he knew the Akatsuki were going to try something.
But that wasn't what was bothering him.
"Ah! Hello, Naruto. How many bowls today?" The man said.
Naruto was at his favorite little ramen joint (we should all know the name by now!!) and as he gently sat down at one of the stools, he silently held up two fingers.
Puzzled by his lack of usual hyper activeness, the man went to prepare his ramen.
Tracing the wood grains in the counter, Naruto let the light late morning breeze lift up above the village: he closed his eyes.
That voice…he thought angrily, it sounds so familiar.
The man placed two bowls of spicy, hot ramen down in front of Naruto. Despite his frustration, he couldn't just sit there and flat-out ignore two steaming bowls of his favorite food. Grasping for a pair of chopsticks, he hastily scooped up some noodles and began slurping.
Midway through his second bowl: it hit him.
"…We kill them."
Finishing off his noodles, he stood abruptly and left without saying thank you. The chop-owner called after him, but Naruto had to go to Tsunade's office.
Turning the corner, dodging other citizens, Naruto thought in disbelief, it--it couldn't have been. Not with the Akatsuki…
The voice rang in his ears again—"We kill them."
The voice belonged to Sasuke.