A/N: Ahhh. This is the kind of chapter I write just for fun. Hee hee!

See you on the other side ~

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Itachi

A couple of hours later, Itachi decided he was ready to go. He broadcast this decision in the group chat, then sat outside the front door to wait. It was a beautiful midmorning, a little warm but not unpleasantly so. Itachi moved out of the building's shadow so he could feel the sun on his face and arms. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The breeze smelled of soil and growing things. It made his thoughts quiet. I really ought to get outside more.

Deidara came out. "Hey, Itachi? Can I ask you something, yeah?"

Itachi paused. A most bizarre urge had come over him. "No."

Deidara blinked. "No?"

"No. I…am not in the mood for thinking right now." It was a very unusual mood. Itachi could not recall the last time he had ever felt like this. He lifted his face up to the sun and closed his eyes again. "It's not often my thoughts are quiet," he told Deidara. "I'd better take advantage."

"Quiet?" From the tone, he knew Deidara's face must be wrinkled in confusion.

"Yes. They are usually noisy. They keep me up at night and I must deliberately ignore them to hear minor sounds."

Deidara said nothing more. When Itachi decided he would like to sit in the grass, he found Deidara sitting next to him. Dei's hands were curled in his lap, whereas Itachi's entire purpose for sitting down had been to feel the ground on his hands. "Is it unpleasant to touch the ground with your hand mouths?" he asked.

Deidara nodded. "I don't like to touch anything icky with my palms, hm."

"Don't give the demon boy ideas," Itachi told him. Deidara's eyes bulged. He became very pale.

"Hi!" Yahiko called. He and Hidan came together. "Oh. It is nice out here."

"Will you guys, um, hold my hands if the kid tries anything?" Deidara squeaked.

"Sure."

Hidan rubbed his hands together. "I can't wait to see what he's come up with. What the fuck are you sitting around for? Let's go!"

They went. Deidara stopped at the boundary of the lawn. He looked down. He looked up. He looked down again. "Is this the lawn?" he asked in a very small voice.

Hidan put a hand on his shoulder. "Oh yeah. Freaked me out the first time too."

"Is that a tree?"

"Yep, that's an actual living tree. Not a prop."

"How does he…?"

"I have no friggin' clue."

Deidara's question reactivated Itachi's thoughts. Hmm. Based on what I've seen and heard of the demon's powers, his main ability seems to be giving his darkness any material properties he wants. Physical manipulation. Did he pull the branches into that shape? No; that's not how tree shaping works. I doubt he would have had the patience to shape them the normal way. He must have other powers that allow him to create this effect. Perhaps his darkness works on much smaller scales than normal, allowing him to push and pull living tissues and even cells. In order to do that, he would have to send it inside a living being. Can he do that? Demons are widely thought to be incompatible with living souls. If our souls are even the least bit divine in nature, which it seems they are, contact with him should destroy the soul or hurt him or both.

Hidan frowned. "Where's that bird singing from?"

"What bird?" Itachi pushed his thoughts aside and listened. He heard one singing…from the top of the unnatural tree. No bird would willingly go there.

"Wow, you weren't kidding, yeah," Deidara said. "The bird isn't even quiet. It's completely audible."

"What?" asked Yahiko.

"Itachi told me earlier that his thoughts are super noisy, yeah."

Itachi nodded. However, it is known that he has other powers. An aura-type effect. Teleportation. Possibly others. I would need to gather information on all of his abilities to understand which one he uses to shape these plants and how.

Hidan touched Itachi's cheek. "Oh, yeah," he exclaimed. "Wow. My head feels all buzzy now." He took his hand away and blinked fiercely. "Where'd the bird go? Does the demon kid like it better when it's warm or cold? Do feathers or fur make better insulation?"

"I would think feathers," Itachi said, "since very small birds can stay active during winter when much larger mammals must sleep in a warm den. And no, it's unlikely that he insulates the building with feathers."

"But that's what I would do if I was a demon," Hidan said.

"His ghosts may not require heating, and the building's structural stability does not depend on material conditions."

"But the books!"

Itachi paused. Books. Delicate. Reading to children. Semblance of normalcy. "Alright, he most likely does insulate and heat the hospital during the winter," Itachi conceded. "I would bet on using fire."

"You think he has enough darkness to put a dragon on this thing?"

"Unless the darkness he is made of is extremely compressed, I doubt that."

Yahiko and Deidara looked back and forth. "This is fun," Yahiko said. He and Deidara bumped fists.

"Onward!" Hidan led the way forward into the hospital. Itachi followed, rubbing his forehead. I really do need to compile all the information we have on the demon boy's powers. That thought and others chased each other around his head. Well, the break couldn't last forever. Back to business as usual.

He waved hello at the ghost as they passed the desk. "Hello there."

Yahiko jumped about a foot in the air. "Is there someone around? Where? How come I didn't see them? Is it a ghost?"

"Yes, it's a ghost," Itachi said. He pointed to the logbook. They watched one page turn, then another.

"That's weird," Deidara whispered loudly.

Hidan huffed. "Don't you start getting all prissy too."

Another mystery. Itachi felt his mind accelerate again. How refreshing. "Hidan. Konan told you once that it was wrong for a person to be outside their bodies and that a complaint ought to be made to the management. You understood her perfectly. How?"

They all looked at Hidan, who frowned. "Whaddaya mean? I think it's perfectly fine to hang out as a ghost. Ghosts aren't evil or anything. They don't bother anyone. They're not worth complaining to the universe about. Now, the way grass always has to fucking catch between my toes when I walk through it barefoot, that's worth a complaint to the universe about. Why does grass have to be so fucking annoying?" He paused as if listening. "And my complaints go nowhere. Typical."

"So you thought the management was some kind of impersonal force? The universe in general, or the laws of causality?"

"Yeah. Or I guess you could say, you know, the big guy."

"God?"

"Yeah." Hidan scratched behind one ear. "But, you know, the big one."

"The…big…one…?" What the hell is he talking about?

"Yeah, like, why's everything related this way? Why's it do this?" Hidan's gaze as he glanced around was distant. Itachi guessed he was not really looking at anything. He checked, and saw that the irises were unusually dark. "This is the way things are, but… That way… Maybe it's the way. Maybe it's the laws of causality. The word made flesh."

By now, Hidan sounded completely unlike himself. His voice had dropped to a monotone and he spoke sluggishly, without a change of pace, as if his lips or mouth were partially paralyzed. Deidara and Yahiko had turned completely white. Yet they said nothing. Itachi was glad; their lack of interference helped him think as fast as he needed to. "Where does God reside in Heaven?" he asked. "Obvious: God is Heaven."

"The world is made of light and it is the light," Hidan murmured.

"The color spectrum."

"Let there be light." This was said in a barely audible whisper. Hidan went entirely silent after that. Itachi was too afraid to look at what little he might have been able to see of Hidan's eyes. Hidan continued to look around, his neck and head tilting smoothly, sluggishly, dreamily. That is not a man.

Deidara looked ready to faint. Yahiko bit his lip. "The colors," he said as quietly as he could. "The gods. Did he mean, why do they relate to each other the way they do? Why do they act and think the way they do? Why do their activities cause worlds to happen? Is that what he was asking about?"

Itachi nodded. "The fact that they are the way they are and act the way they act is itself the reason. The laws of causality. The basis of reality. No, reality itself. God literally is existence."

Hidan had not moved for some time. His shoulders slumped. "Mm." His head started to fall back, but jerked forward at the last second. He rubbed at his eyes as if awaking from a deep sleep.

Itachi forcibly suppressed his remaining fear. He put a steadying hand on Hidan's shoulder. "How was your dream?"

Hidan blinked. "What dream?"

"Did you not dream an incredible dream just now? About life, the universe, and everything?"

Hidan blinked harder. "What the fuck?"

Deidara gulped. "Is everything okay?"

Hidan turned toward Itachi. "I didn't before you said that, but you said it, and then I remembered. But I could fucking swear -"

"That there was nothing to remember before?"

Hidan shot him a most suspicious look. Itachi smiled and shrugged.

"You're lAAaaaaAAte," the demon boy sang from the ceiling. His eyes turned into happy little curves. "But I'll allow it." He hopped down from the ceiling and gestured for them to follow. They did so. Itachi couldn't help but notice that the boy waved at numerous patches of thin air they passed. Can he see ghosts?

"You, there," the boy said, pointing to the same seat in front of the bookshelf that Itachi had used last time he played.

Itachi unslung his guitar case from his shoulders and complied. "Enjoy your tour," he told everyone else.

Hidan turned away and raised an arm into the air proudly. "Onward!"

Yahiko

As he had said he would, Hidan led them back to the reception area for a closer investigation of the holes in the floor. They looked down into the largest one. There wasn't much to see. It was dark. Hidan shrugged and jumped. Most of a second passed before he landed. His white hair was barely visible. "Pretty tall room down here," he said, then moved out from below the hole.

Yahiko jumped next. He didn't even think about it. He looked around. It was still dark, so there still wasn't much to see. He gathered chakra in his palm. Its faint light didn't illuminate very much, but it would work if he held it really close to something. It also made his own position very obvious. Hidan praised the idea and gathered chakra in his palm, too. Deidara jumped down next. From multiple faint light sources, they saw him fumble with his hands. He shook his head. "I don't want to touch anything without knowing what it is, either, yeah."

"Come with me then." Yahiko and Deidara explored in one direction, and Hidan the other. Many spiders had made the walls their home, and they saw the occasional insect wiggling its shiny body out of a small hole in the stones. Overall, the wall seemed surprisingly free of life. "Nothing that would have to destroy the wall can live here," Yahiko murmured. "Because he uses his demon powers to prevent the building from falling apart."

"Still too many bugs," Deidara whimpered. Yahiko turned and saw that Dei's hands were stuffed firmly in his pockets. He held out his own hand. Deidara took it. His grip was like a vise as they explored the rest of the room.

They stopped in front of some structures bolted into the wall. Yahiko directed the light down. Restraints. "It's not an old-timey haunted hospital without chains in the basement," Deidara whispered. "Will we hear the ghosts of the tortured down here?"

Yahiko listened carefully. "I don't hear anything."

"How are you so calm, hm?"

"...I don't know. I just am."

"Don't ghosts freak you out at all, hm?"

Yahiko imagined a ghost spying on him in his female form. He was shocked to find that his heart only sped up a moderate amount. "Well, they are a little eerie, but nothing I would call freaking out."

Deidara shivered. "I'm really not cool with this supernatural stuff, yeah."

Yahiko squeezed his hand. "I think it's neat."

Hidan took Deidara's other hand. He had long since finished exploring his side of the room. "When I first checked this place out, I picked up happy feelings. He's been making repairs, getting furniture and shit, really fixing the place up. They're happy here."

"He has? He doesn't seem like the kind of kid to do that, hm."

"Yeah, he got bored. So bored he had to try something he never tried before. I think it's working for him." Hidan chuckled. "I'm glad. Turns out the kid's kinda nice. Hey, did I ever tell you guys about how my fake memories of him are totally accurate?"

"Accurate?"

"Yeah, he was actually here in this world before this whole bubble thing started. He really did act exactly like I remember."

They looked back down at the shackles. "Did you find anything else on your side?" Deidara asked. Hidan said he had not. "I'd like to get out of here then, yeah."

"Wait. I found the door. You want to go out that way?"

Yahiko squeezed Deidara's hand. "It'll be okay."

They went to the door and tried it. After a great effort, it opened, its hinges shrieking like lost souls. They entered a hallway and went through it very slowly, struggling to take in their surroundings by chakra light. None of them complained. Hidan seemed to love the darkness and the spookiness, Yahiko wasn't the type to complain by default, and Deidara was too frightened to. The dim blueish light made shadows out of everything and hinted at far more than it revealed.

With much yanking and bracing himself with chakra, Hidan was able to pull open another door. This one, located in a side hallway that branched off from the hall that led to the restraint room, opened on what was clearly a kitchen. A couple of corroded pans still hung on their hooks. After passing them, Yahiko glanced back. It was as if a part of him had known that the pans would be swinging. He said nothing to Deidara.

"I really don't like the dark, yeah," Deidara whispered.

"Why not?"

"Anything could be in it, yeah. I remember lying in bed as a kid, after I heard that old legend about spiders crawling into people's mouths, terrified of what could crawl into mine. And the worst part was that I wouldn't be able to see it coming, yeah."

"We're moving and you haven't touched anything," Yahiko reassured him. "Anything that wanted to do that would have to climb all the way up your legs, deliberately. I don't think any bug would do that." Even so, Deidara brushed at his pants with one fist.

"Hey, check this out," Hidan called. "A huge fucking ladle!" He held it up. Some parts of it still shone in the light. Yahiko and Deidara agreed that indeed, it was huge. Hidan went over to the hanging pans and used the ladle to tap them. The resulting sounds weren't particularly musical, but he seemed to be having fun, if his saying "Bonk bonk bonk" was anything to go by.

When he got bored, Hidan held the ladle against his shoulder like he would his own scythe. Yahiko blinked. How did I not realize he didn't have his scythe with him before now? "Where's your scythe?" Yahiko asked.

"Away," Hidan whispered back. "It'd make me too easy of a target here." That reminded them that not only were they exploring a creepy abandoned building, but said building was supposed to be outfitted with tricks and traps laid by a mischievous little boy with dubious morals. Nobody was surprised to find that the door to the kitchen was now closed. "Now the fun starts," Hidan chirped as he shoved the door open. He needed to push much harder than he had before; in fact, Yahiko and Deidara had to help him. They got the door open a couple of inches…and then they heard the very distinct sound of something heavy, lumpish, and a little wet sliding down the door and falling to the floor.

Deidara cringed away from the door. "Was that a dead body?"

"Probably not," Hidan said sharply. "Because he knows how I feel about disturbing people's dead relatives. The dead guys stay in the graveyard. This is probably just an illusion: the sound and feel of one, but when we go out there'll be nothing there." He pushed the door the rest of the way open by himself. It encountered no resistance and they found nothing when they stepped outside.

Now, Yahiko was starting to get frightened. His fear of ghosts may have diminished when he made progress towards accepting himself, but he still had a healthy fear of monsters and tricks. He and Deidara were inseparable now. They held each other's hands for both their sakes.

Hidan led the way down the hallway, Deidara and Yahiko close enough that they could see him and touch him. Now would be a really bad time to be separated. Hidan stopped and cocked his head. They all listened. Nothing. He made some kind of gesture at Deidara and Yahiko, which they interpreted as Keep paying attention, and started walking again. They heard it - the soft shuffling sound of footsteps behind them. They stopped again. It stopped too. Deidara tried to glance back, but the hallway was entirely dark. He couldn't see beyond a foot and a half from himself. Anything might have been there.

"Eh," Hidan said. "Nothing to worry about unless it gets close and turns out to be something that physically exists. If it does, a bonk on the head from Spoony here should banish it."

"Spoony? That's a ladle."

"Which is a cousin of a spoon. What's your point?"

"...Nothing. So that's the rules now? A bonk on the head from a giant ladle, and the monsters will be vanquished?"

"Yep. That's the rule for me, anyway," Hidan said. "Come on. You know we're going to get separated at some point."

"Probably now that you've reassured us with the ladle," Yahiko realized.

"No," Deidara squeaked. "We can prevent it, right? Please tell me we can, yeah."

Hidan huffed. "You can try keeping your eyes on me at all times. He only separated me and Konan when we looked away from each other. But that would be hard work on your part, and fucking boring, and against the spirit of this whole thing. I didn't come here to have the both of you holding on to me like a fucking conga line. This is supposed to be an adventure. Relax into it already."

Deidara whimpered. "Excuse me for not wanting to be trapped in the dark with monsters and bugs and probably bug monsters stalking me!"

"Don't worry," Yahiko said. He was amazed to hear himself sound confident and leaderly. He was still scared, of course, but it was as if all of that had been shoved into a separate corner of his mind. Deidara needed him. He had to be there. "If you ended up alone in the dark, you'd probably panic and stand still and not do anything. That would be boring. So we won't get separated."

"Do you know anything about fighting monsters?" Deidara asked, clutching his arm.

"I may not have a giant spoon, but I have tackled a demon with my bare hands before."

"Yeah, you got this," Hidan said as he turned away. "Let's keep going. It happens when it happens."

They found a room with lines of rope strung across it, clothespins still attached. "Laundry. Great." Hidan turned right around. "Eff this. Let's go back to the hallway that led to the restraining room. There's got to be cells or something at the other end of that."

Yahiko and Deidara held on for dear life as they approached the approximate spot where the footsteps had come from, but to their immense relief there was nothing there. "Told ya," Hidan said. He looked back at them. "To be honest, now that the both of you are freaked, this isn't such a cool adventure anymore. I could handle it when it was just Dei. But the both of you being scared makes my guts crawl."

"What are you saying?" Deidara asked, hurt.

Hidan said nothing. He made eye contact with both of them. Then he stepped backward and disappeared around the corner before they could blink.

Neither Deidara nor Yahiko bothered to chase after him. They knew he wouldn't be there. Deidara swore. Yahiko muttered, "I knew he was going to do that when he looked at us." They looked at each other. Deidara leaned in and held onto Yahiko's arm. It's up to me. I'm the strong one. I have to protect him. Yahiko raised his right hand, that held the chakra light, higher. "Let's go."

They went around the corner. It was unclear where Hidan could have gone. Yahiko told Deidara about the time he entered a perfectly normal room, and it suddenly turned into a winding tunnel of horrors that led into a short maze which turned into a spiral which dumped him back into the room. "The demon kid can bend space and time," he said. "I'm sure Hidan's in another dimension, or another half of this one, or something." In the time it took him to tell this story, he had found and wrenched open another door. They stepped inside. It was a cell. A sinister creaking sound announced the door's closing behind them. They turned, but did nothing to stop the door. The sight of a hand gripping the edge of the door froze them to the spot. The door closed, and they heard the sound of a key turning in the lock. The lock sounded heavy and its mechanisms not well cared for. They were trapped.

Deidara tried to speak but could not. "Mm mm mm."

"A dark creation," Yahiko squeaked. He was trying that trick Nagato had used: thinking so as to keep the ability to think. "He must have made some of his darkness into a person, and into a key."

"I don't give a fuck how he did that. What the hell do we do now, yeah?!" Deidara was plainly on the verge of hysterics.

Yahiko looked around. The cell contained a bed on the left side, a plain mattress laid atop a simple wooden frame. The decayed remnants of sheets hung from it. The far right corner had a sink and a bucket and was very dirty. Fortunately, any stinky organic matter had long since decayed, so at least the toilet area didn't smell like one. The faint smell of ammonia was tolerable. A small bedside set of drawers stood next to the bed in a mockery of basic human dignity. Yahiko bit his lip. "Maybe the room is like a puzzle, like one of those puzzle games online," he said. "We can search the room for clues to help us escape."

"Get that light back on the lock, yeah." He did so. They both saw that the lock was not accessible from the inside. "Fuck that," Deidara whispered.

"Maybe there's another door."

"To fucking where?!"

"Some kind of outer dimensional space. I don't know. He could have done anything." Yahiko went to the bed first. He lifted up the mattress and threw it to the floor. They examined the wooden frame and found nothing. He examined the mattress next, prodding it with his fingers. There were no hiding spaces in it. While he did that, Deidara pulled all the drawers out. He laid them on top of the mattress. The contents were pitiful: a photo, too faded and mildewed to be visible, and some sets of underwear, and a hairclip. It wasn't just any hairclip, though. It looked fancy, hand carved most likely, possibly out of ivory, and it had someone's initials engraved in it. They had been carved in an ornate cursive style of lettering that was now too distorted to be legible.

"Maybe it's a key, or…" Deidara sighed.

"Wait." Yahiko looked at the photo. "Hidan said the demon kid's been fixing things up to make his ghosts happy. He wouldn't have left their possessions to rot in a cell. These were important to somebody. That means… They've been planted here. And the fouling is probably fake."

As he said these words, both objects began to change. The lettering became sharper and clearer, and the mildew vanished. Deidara took the items. "L.M.," he read off the hairclip. "And the picture shows a man standing with two children, a boy and a girl."

"It is like a puzzle game!" Yahiko exclaimed. Deidara pocketed the two artifacts and they went over to the sink. Yahiko held the light right up to the drain and squinted. Did he see a little gleam? "Hiding something in a drain," he murmured. "Common video game puzzle."

"How are we gonna get the drain out of the way, hm?"

"Do you have any clay on you? Any at all?"

"No fucking way! And no."

"I just thought… You've been getting pretty good with mini explosives…" Yahiko sighed. "My chakra's good for healing and water. That's it."

"Water? Hmm. There shouldn't be any in a sink this old, but if it's a game…"

"Dei, you're a genius!" Yahiko performed the hand signs that allowed him to lift water up and form it into a stream. Sure enough, there was a little bit of water in the drain. Yahiko slammed his palm down on top of it before it could escape the drain. "Why do my magical powers have to use hand signs?! Why can't I just waterbend? That would be so much more intuitive!"

"What's waterbending?"

"You haven't heard of that show?"

Deidara shook his head.

"It's…" Yahiko paused. "A lot more interesting and snappy than hand signs are. Maybe here, I can. Or at least do a convincing impression of it." He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. When he lifted his hand, the water had turned to ice. Whatever was in the drain was trapped inside, along with the grill of the drain itself. Yahiko made a pulling motion. The ice strained to follow. It easily defeated the corroded drain, slapping into Yahiko's hand hard enough to make him wince. He turned the water liquid again. In his palm he now held two things: a tiny metal grill, and a small cog.

They went all around the room, searching the walls. Behind the set of drawers, Deidara found a curious pattern in the wall. It was a lock, but circular, with the ends of its pins exposed in the circle. Yahiko gasped. "The cog isn't the key; it was the grill!" He hesitated. "I need both hands to do this. I have to put the light out."

"You sure you can't…?"

"I'll relight my palm once I have a firm grip on this thing. It would just be too distracting right now." Yahiko released his chakra, plunging the cell into darkness. He held the grill, which was circular and had holes all around its edge, in between his thumb and other fingers. He channeled chakra into his palm again. In his other hand, he had never stopped holding the liquid water. He pushed it through the holes now and made it freeze. 6 columns of ice now stick out from the grill like screws. Yahiko examined the lock, noted which way the pins faced, put in the key and turned it clockwise. Mechanical sounds came from behind the wall and the whole wall shuddered open. Yahiko tried to remove the key, but couldn't. His faux waterbending didn't work anymore. I really should have brought water with me. He and Deidara joined hands once again and stepped through the stone door. It swung shut behind them.

The passageway narrowed almost instantly. From the person-sized entryway they had stepped through, it almost immediately became a rough-hewn little tunnel that they would have to crawl through. Deidara gasped. "Eugh." He closed his hand mouths firmly. But he made no sign of protest when Yahiko got down to enter the tunnel, and Yahiko realized that he seemed much less scared than before. Thinking of it as a game helped! But now the kid's sure to come up with something to spook us. I hope I can handle whatever it is.

If something spooky was going to frighten them out of their wits again, it didn't meet them in the tunnel. It was a relatively uneventful crawl. "Do you think this tunnel was already here?" Deidara asked. "Old buildings have secret tunnels all the time, yeah."

"Maybe he only added the puzzle lock," Yahiko agreed.

They emerged into another cell. They tried the door. It was unlocked. They high fived each other and stepped out into the hallway. "Oh, I never thought I'd be so happy to be in a dark hallway in the creepy basement of an abandoned hospital, yeah!"

Then they heard footsteps. Close ones. "We don't have Spoony," Yahiko whispered. "Run!" They ran the other way. Yahiko stopped to pull open the doors they passed. He didn't waste time exploring the cells. Eventually, they found a small office. "In here!" They closed the door behind themselves.

"I'll hold it," Deidara whispered. "You look for something we can use like Spoony." Yahiko nodded and went to search.

The back wall of the office was lined with shelves. Those shelves were once filled with things that guards would need in an emergency; Yahiko saw cubbyholes and hooks for batons, handcuffs, and other things. An old airhorn still lay on its side. He searched the cubbies hoping for a baton. But there was nothing.

He went back to Deidara and shook his head. "This is an old guard station, but everything's been taken. No weapons."

Deidara blinked. "Where do you think a guard station would be?"

Yahiko laughed. "We're right next to the stairs, aren't we?"

Deidara had felt nothing trying to force the door open. With him behind the door and Yahiko to the side of it, he opened the door slowly. Yahiko shone his light out. "I don't see anything." He didn't hear anything either. They stepped outside and turned to the right. The stairs were less than a dozen feet away.

Deidara opened the door at the top and cried out in relief as light came beaming through. He ran out and cheered. "Yeah! We did it!"

"Nice!" Hidan said. "I had to beat a lot of things over their heads with Spoony in total darkness. What'd you guys do?"

"We got locked in a puzzle room," Yahiko told him. He told Hidan everything. Hidan was hooked. He put an arm over Deidara's shoulders and shook him proudly. Deidara grinned.

They looked around. They were in an unfamiliar part of the hospital. Hidan guessed that they should look for a window to get their bearings. Once again, they headed for the nearest room. "You still scared of creepy hospitals, Blondie?" he asked.

"No. Not anymore, yeah."

"I knew that." Hidan looked out the window of the room they had entered. "Oh, we're right at the back. Let's go to the front and meet up with Itachi. We got to tell him all about this."

.

A/N: Oh, how I love writing horror adventures. I really do. I've always enjoyed games like that, even if I did freeze and close the window and sit back in the chair until my heart stopped hammering the first one or two times I played them. (Looking at you, Being One episode 2.) I may be easily scared, but once I am able to get a proper emotional distance there is just something about these games that's really cool. Aagghh! I love them so much. And stories, too... I like creepypastas. But only certain ones, the ones where you're not ever quite sure what it is you're running from, only that you need to never know what it was.

Feel free to tell me how this one was!

Next week will be the last chapter of Year 3. Year 4 of this story will start two weeks from now. I can't believe it's come so far. I can't believe I have. This is incredible. Many, many thanks to anyone who's bothered reading this far.