A/N: :D

The following chapter is the sort of thing I write for fun. Hee hee!

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Kakuzu

Kakuzu and Kisame went shopping. Kisame was in the mood for something involving fish, but they didn't have any. He drove. Kakuzu sat beside him, arms crossed. But it seemed Kisame was too busy thinking of the thing he wanted to eat to ask why.

"Little bastard," Kakuzu grumbled as they got out of the car.

"Huh? Who is? What happened?"

"Hidan. He hasn't gone out and earned anything for me recently."

Kisame grinned. "You sound like his dad."

Kakuzu shot him a glare. "I like money."

"He doesn't have any debts to you last I heard. Why do you care so much? What's this really about?"

They put the conversation on hold to get a cart and enter the store. Kisame meandered through it looking for anything else that might be needed. When nobody was nearby, Kakuzu said, "I overheard something this morning."

Kisame put a can of baked beans back on the shelf. "What?"

"I was doing pushups in my room when I heard it. I didn't catch everything. But I will swear the word 'conspiracy' came up."

"So…what? You think there's another one?"

"I think I have some questions. If that little bastard hadn't gone to the haunted hospital of all places, I would have asked him." Kakuzu tightened his fists. "How can he be friends with that little brat?"

Kisame pushed the cart further and looked around, but selected nothing. His enthusiasm seemed to have gone. Kakuzu heard him mutter something to himself. For the first time, it occurred to Kakuzu that maybe he shouldn't allow his grumpiness to have free rein. His friend was stressed because he had allowed himself to get defensive with barely any provocation. Honestly, they could have been talking about anything. He was going to spend a lot of time wearing his grumpy face if this was the amount of cause he needed to get paranoid. Did he want to wear his grumpy face so much? He had no idea. He'd never thought about it.

Kakuzu shrugged his shoulders and rolled his neck from side to side. He strode up and took control of the cart. "Fish aisle's this way."

They found the shelves with canned fish. Kisame dithered between mackerel and tuna before selecting several cans of each. "I still haven't fully processed the last conspiracy," he admitted. "I know I said I was okay with it and I've been acting like I'm okay with it, but it takes a while, you know?"

"I may have been overreacting," Kakuzu muttered. "I didn't actually hear them say there was a new conspiracy afoot. They could have been talking about the last one. Around here, you can't afford to react too much to things."

"Itachi never reacts too much to stuff. I'll wait a while and then call him," Kisame said. He sounded relieved.

They bought some other vegetables for the thing that Kisame wanted to make, pasta, and a loaf of raisin bread. Kakuzu automatically turned toward the dairy aisle after they decided to get the raisin bread. Kisame asked what he was doing. They looked at each other with deep and mutual bafflement. "When you get raisin bread, you also get cream cheese," Kakuzu said slowly as if explaining to a child.

"Why?" Kisame asked.

More mutual bafflement. "For raisin bread and cream cheese sandwiches. Obviously."

"You eat raisin bread untoasted?"

"You don't?"

"Ew," Kisame said.

"Haven't you ever had cinnamon raisin bagels?"

"Yes, but those are completely different. They're bagels, not bread. Also, I butter my bagels. Cream cheese is for cheesecake, and that's it."

"If I don't get cream cheese, Hidan will whine at me about how unfair I am for denying him his dessert sandwiches." Kakuzu resumed pushing the cart. "So I'm getting some."

Kisame made a face. "Dessert sandwiches?"

"Sandwiches that are not considered real food, but instead forms of dessert. Jelly and cream cheese or jelly and butter are other favorites of his."

"Ugh. Don't tell me he uses marshmallow fluff, too."

"Hell to the fuck no. Even he wouldn't stoop that low. And according to his tongue's imagination, marshmallow would taste better with peanut butter." There were a couple different brands of cream cheese. Kakuzu chose the cheapest one.

"What the hell did you just say? Tongue imagination?"

Kakuzu shrugged. "Don't ask me. He insists he has the ability to imagine how different tastes will combine without ever having tried them or anything like them. He had an epiphany once where he was making sardine sandwiches and suddenly realized pickles would make an excellent addition. Hasn't eaten them without pickle slices since."

Kisame shook his head. "I have no idea how sardines and pickles would go together, and I'm not about to make a sandwich just to find out."

Kakuzu pulled out his phone. "Let's do a survey. Who…understands…what…I mean…by 'tongue imagination'?" He turned his notifications off silent and put his phone back in his pocket. "The results should be interesting."

By the time they paid and went out to the car, he had already gotten two results. Nagato and Yahiko both enthusiastically said they did. Deidara answered a few minutes later to say he had no idea what anyone was talking about. Konan said she had never had any use for such a talent, so she didn't know. Kakuzu kept an eye on the chat as they drove home, but received no more responses.

When they arrived, Kisame took everything into the kitchen. "You call somebody, I'll get the water boiling," he told Kakuzu. Kakuzu did as requested, looking up and then dialing the number of the home renovation company he personally used. He explained that he needed a kitchen sink installed, and space would have to be made for it in what was currently a closed countertop. No, no plumbing work was needed, there was a pipe already there. The last person to get the counters done had just apparently decided they didn't need a sink anymore. He negotiated prices, what kind of sink would be preferred, etc. When the call ended, he turned around to find Kisame inspecting the counters.

"The edges are worn," Kisame said uneasily. "These aren't new countertops. There's been no sink for a while."

"The building is abandoned." But Kakuzu had the feeling he knew what Kisame was getting at.

"The corners wouldn't be worn if they'd never been used." Kisame pointed to a short stretch where the top corner of the otherwise whitish counter was blackened. "That's use."

Kakuzu took a look at it himself. Kisame was right. "Or at least, it looks like it's been used," he muttered. "It has the look of a cozy kitchen. And this is the room she wanted to meet us in that night."

"So, what, someone made this place to be convenient for her?" Kisame facepalmed as soon as he said it. "Of course someone did. Narrative convenience."

"Why the hell doesn't it have a sink? What reason can there be for that?"

"Wanted to give this place more of a mysterious vibe, perhaps?"

"Very stupid way to do so."

"I don't know, a kitchen that inexplicably has no sink sends shivers up my spine, even now. It's like an office with no trash cans. Just, what the fuck happened to bring that about?"

Kakuzu turned around and gave him a flat look. "You would find an office with no trash cans to be creepy."

"You just imagine being in someplace like that," Kisame retorted.

Kakuzu did imagine it. The concept did not send shivers up his spine. But then he realized Kisame had probably left out a detail he thought so obvious it did not need to be stated: the office in question was occupied, or had been recently. People sitting in desks, going about their work, not a trashcan in sight. Hmph. That would be eerie. "Is the office in question occupied?"

"Uh…duh. Of course it is."

"You should have said so. Now that I'm imagining people somehow going about their business with no trashcans, acting as if nothing is wrong with this picture, I can agree it's eerie."

"Huh," Kisame said. "Now that I think about it, office which performs sacrifices to the devil every Tuesday: not creepy, just hokey. Office which is secretly the staging ground of a plot to take over the world: not creepy, just real life. But an office with no trashcans is creepy. How does that work?"

"Well, like you said, the first one's blatantly fictional. But no trashcans is vaguely realistic. It could happen. It's so unlikely that it would never happen on its own, someone would need to deliberately arrange it, but it could happen. The scariest horror stories are always the ones that could really happen."

"It's not horrific though."

"It's blatantly abnormal." Kakuzu looked up at the ceiling and thought of other things that would be blatantly abnormal, yet within the realm of reality. "A forest where all of the trees lean in the same direction, but there's no slope or path or prevailing wind to explain why. A bridge with a rifle post on it. A summer camp where every child seems genuinely happy to be there. A pack of teenagers doing homework in unison."

"Please stop," Kisame said with a shiver. "Any one of those could be the starting premise for an episode of some supernatural mystery show. Jesus." He added a box of macaroni to the now-boiling water and gave it a stir.

"That's it," Kakuzu said. "That's why these ideas are so much creepier than ritual sacrifices and black mass. With ritual sacrifices, you know what's happening. With these things, you get the feeling you don't. They imply that something else is happening, something you have only the smallest clue about."

"Like how the missing sink here is best explained by our entire world being fictional and under the control of a completely flawed human being," Kisame said. "The sink was a hint of that."

"It was. But we were too busy with magic and demons and vampires to be creeped out by it."

"I'm a little creeped out by it now," Kisame repeated. He busied himself with chopping up vegetables. Clearly, he didn't want to talk about it anymore. So Kakuzu turned to the group chat. Who wants to hear creepy ideas?

Me! Me! Me! answered Hidan.

Alright. Here they are:

A staircase where every third step is rotten, and all others are perfectly fine.

All of your devices break…but only when used in one particular room.

Every time you plug your new headphones in to listen to something, you hear static for the first thirty seconds. Not the sounds of the device; actual static, like on TV. This happens no matter what you plug them into.

A house with footprints worn into the roof tiles.

A rifle post above a hiking trail. It's not old.

Every goddamn carrot you buy has the exact same kink in it.

Deidara sent a shivering emoji. Hidan sent a laughing emoji. Kakuzu, when did you become a creative genius? asked Nagato.

Kisame actually came up the idea, and only in reference to the kitchen that has no sink.

"Kakuzu, what are you doing?" Kisame muttered. His phone, naturally, was always set to vibrate when it received a notification.

"Delighting everybody with your wonderful idea. They think you're a creative genius now."

"Oh god."

Nagato

"Well, that's my cue to head back," Nagato said. "You ready, Sammy?" Samehada turned away from the abandoned house and nuzzled his leg. They were on the edge of the abandoned houses west of town where the vampires lived. They turned back.

Konan frowned as she walked. "Acquiring a cellphone has not helped me understand the dynamics of this group very much."

"How so? I mean, what is still mysterious?"

"Why did you decide to turn back just now?"

Nagato looked at her. "Well, Kakuzu's acting unlike himself."

"And why does this make you turn back?"

This, Nagato had to actually think about. "Well… It put an end to what I was doing before."

Konan tilted her head. "You are abandoning this venture because your chain of thought was interrupted?"

"Yeah, pretty much. I'm in the mood for something else now."

Konan shrugged. She did not seem to understand any more than she had before. "May we conclude our conversation?"

"Oh, yes, of course. Just so I have it right: you feel like an alien because the way we act isn't natural to you? Because you would have to take a class on it to understand?"

Konan nodded. "What kind of person must take a class on human behavior?"

"Itachi recommended to me once a book on how to have conversations," Nagato told her. "He said it changed his life. Not especially difficult conversations - ordinary ones."

"Oh, yes. He has told me that he, too, feels isolated."

"But this particular kind of isolation," Nagato said. "Which is a little weird. I mean, it's not the most common type."

Konan smiled. "Either way, I am grateful for your forgiveness."

"Anytime."

As they walked, Nagato thought of what he was going to say to Yahiko when they next met up. His heart began to flutter. He knew the most important conversation of his entire life would happen before the day was over. I think I'm finally ready, but it's still scary!

Konan put a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Courage."

Nagato nodded. "'It takes great courage to stand up to your enemies. But it takes even greater courage to stand up to your friends,'" he paraphrased.

"Is that a quote?"

"Yes. From a story set in a school where, among other things, the different groups of students win awards based on morally outstanding behavior. The headmaster, who is magic and thus implied to be all-knowing, uses that as his reason for awarding last-minute points to a boy who tried to stop his friends from endangering themselves."

"An interesting system. What do they win?'

"Bragging rights, mostly."

"Honor. I see. That makes perfect sense."

"You know," Nagato said, "that series was set in a class-based society with very distinct hierarchies that everyone has to at least work with. No wonder it makes sense to you. Your world sounds more similar to that society than ours does." He suddenly halted. "Wait. Hold on, I just realized something. Does your entire world have the same social structure?"

"Yes. The fact that this world does not puzzles me."

"Well, our societies developed in isolation for thousands of years! Of course they would be wildly different now."

"Ah, that explains it. Until very recently, and by that I mean within the lifetime of people still alive today, the world was populated by roving clans that frequently mingled and fought with each other. There was not isolation."

"How small is your world?"

"How large is this one?"

"It would take multiple continuous days to fly around the world in a jet that traveled at hundreds of miles per hour. Typical human walking speed is around two miles per hour, for comparison."

She needed only a few seconds to do the math in her head. "Much smaller. Very much smaller."

Nagato wondered how that could be possible. Was her Earth physically smaller than his Earth? No; if that was the case it would have weaker gravity. So why was there so much less landmass? Or…was there less landmass? "It sounds to me like your people have colonized only one continent," he said. "This world technically has seven, if you ignore the fact that they're all bound up in supercontinents."

Konan shrugged. "That may be true. Shinobi have lived for so long in warring clans, caring only for the next battle, maintaining carefully defended territories for as long as they could. No explorers. Chaos may have isolated us."

"I'm trying to think of it now," Nagato said. "A world where exploration wasn't as simple as packing up camp and moving a few more miles down the road every year. A world where every explorer was like Columbus, setting out across the unknown sea. That's not how humans spread over this world. All our lands are or were interconnec ted. We colonized six of the seven continents completely by accident, just because populations grow and split and follow the herds. We didn't mean to put representatives of our species all over the world. People just moved camp for thousands of years. In a world where the lands weren't all linked, would that just not have happened?" He envisioned a globe with many separate patches of land. There's no way the human species would have stayed on whatever continent they evolved. We colonized Hawaii, and that's pretty far out in the ocean. But there was no way for the ancient Polynesians to keep in touch with anyone back home to let them know that there was land all the way out in the ocean until modern travel technology was invented. Maybe her society isn't the only society. On some other landmass there's a whole country waiting to be discovered filled with people who live in a completely different way and speak a completely different language. They just haven't met yet.

He tapped himself hard on the head. No, that's not right. There is no "waiting to be discovered." That's inaccurate. They're people living perfectly fine lives. They're not waiting for anything.

"Are you alright?" Konan asked.

"Yeah, I was just reminding myself not to use a certain phrase that's derogatory to people who are on the receiving end of exploration."

Konan looked entirely befuddled. Nagato realized he had to explain what to him were facts about human behavior that had been known for hundreds of years. "When people go exploring, and they meet other people, and they try to take over and they win, they end up writing the history books with themselves cast as brave explorers expanding into 'available land' (he used finger quotes), and the people that were already there as immobile statues just waiting to be discovered. Not complex and dynamic people that might have discovered them first if luck had been just a little different."

"You believe there are other peoples in my world, perhaps on other continents."

"Yeah. A little bit of ocean isn't going to stop a fishing party from getting blown out to sea and paddling until they hit land. But it would stop them from sending news back home, so how would you know?"

"We have advanced far beyond the age of canoes."

"And used these advancements for anything other than fighting each other?"

"...No."

"If your world ever gets peaceful…" Nagato clapped his hands. "It'll get a lot more complicated."

"War is, if anything, brutally simple," Konan murmured.

"How much do you actually know about the other countries we have in this world?"

"I have not spent my time and energy studying that so far."

By then, they had reached the road the hotel was on. Nagato's shoulders slumped. Aw man. I was having so much fun. "Looks like you'll have to ask someone else about it. I'd better prepare."

Konan did not ask for what. She nodded. "I will see what Itachi has to tell me."

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A/N: This chapter was deliberately left short. The only thing I could think of for a final scene was not a final scene at all, but an omake. So here it shall be.

Travelogue

Dear Diary,

Hello. I have heard that other people find diaries useful. I don't know why. But I am in need of any help I can get. My name is Itachi, and I am fifteen years old. I'm far from home and alone. I could really use some guidance right now.

I don't know what I'm doing. I've managed well so far by keeping my mouth shut. If I don't speak, and I work well, I am accepted at the jobs I take. But the only jobs I can find at my age are hard and tedious, and I see the others having such a better time as they are able to talk with each other and joke and complain. I can't do any of those things. I know they will reject me, laugh at and tease me. Nobody will understand anything I say. I'm like those super smart characters in movies and books who interrupt gym class to announce that the volleyball net is an inch too low for regulation. Which, if they are in fact trying to play the sport the official way, I admit I don't know why it's wrong to say so. It seems like it's supposed to be obvious. What is wrong with me?

I'm supposed to have it all figured out. I looked after Sasuke. I made dinner. I was the man of the house. I'm very smart and I work hard. Other people my age are deciding what they will do with the rest of their lives and falling in love. And I'm only falling behind. Without Shisui, I really don't have anything figured out at all.

Please, Diary, or anyone else who might be listening: I wish for a friend. I wish for a sense of control over my life. I wish to learn how to be part of the world. I know I shouldn't wish for this since I'm supposed to be grown up now, but I wish for a family. I want to be home again. It's scary out here. I want to go home.

I probably will not write in here again for fear someone will discover these embarrassing ramblings. So I suppose this is goodbye. Goodbye, Diary.

Sincerely,

Itachi

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A/N: *sniff*