If anyone read "Zombie Brother" last November, you might like this new one. The 40s film which inspired that and "Tales From the Crypt Presents Ritual" - none other than the movie this fic is named and based off. A tale of brother against brother, their love for a woman who lived among the dead, and a young nurse who didn't believe such things could happen. (words from the epic movie trailer) This is femNaruto, if anyone didn't guess from the summary.

In this first chapter are some mentions of race, but please do NOT be offended. I am nowhere near racist, but this is part of the history, the culture, and what happened in the movie. Much of it was based on facts, as have been other masterpieces of the time period. No flaming on my part intended.

Disclaimer: I own neither Naruto or the classic movie I Walked With a Zombie. Cover image is one of the movie's posters.

Chapter One

Nothing Here is Beautiful

A year ago, I walked with a zombie. And I mean literally walked. It sounds like a metaphor, and a damned good one that has many meanings.

A year ago, if I said those words by the time it happened, it would have seemed very strange. Strange, frightening - and a little funny if I had no idea what it was.

It all began in an odd but ordinary way. It started first in my hometown of Konoha, Japan. I had finished nursing school and had no idea where to go, but my parents were both gone. They'd died years ago when I was a child, in a house fire, and my grandfather Jiraiya rescued me and raised me. He was my guardian up to when I got into nursing school, while all my friends went off to do their own parts. Then he ended up getting shot by gangsters while undercover; he was a member of the secret services.

When Jiraiya was gone, I really had no family left, and all my friends were busy with their own lives. I focused on my career which was what my mom, Kushina, had been, and she taught me enough as a kid. I felt if I didn't become a registered nurse, I'd forget about her.

If you want to know about my dad, Minato, he used to be in the police force before he chose to leave it as soon as I came into the picture. Something happened to make that decision for him, and he and Mom were gone before they could tell me. I even asked my grandfather, who told me that he would tell me the truth when I was older. Although he died before he got the chance. I remember crying for days, my few friends comforting me, and so had my boss, since she was an old girlfriend of my grandfather's when they were younger. I was a little surprised to know that she still had some feelings for him.

I eventually decided it didn't matter, because all I cared about was cherishing my family and what they gave me.

Life is filled with ups and downs, but I still love to live it.

Although, now that I was done with nursing school, I was speaking to my mentor, Tsunade, who ran the hospital in regarding of a position that was overseas. I couldn't have been a little more shocked. Overseas! I had never been away from home before, but she saw this as an opportunity for me to get away from my comfort zone, to expand, and to get away for awhile. It was a whole new world out there, she said.

And I also fit the credentials of this man who sent out the flier, here to Japan of all places, because he was a native, yet his family owned that plantation of St. Sebastian. I remember from history it was one of many to import slaves on ships in those days. I can still recall cringing when I saw those movie clips and pictures in textbooks, in every one you can think of. I wondered if there was servitude over there in the West Indies today, if nothing brutal like the past.

Anyway, back to the present regarding me. I was single, educated well by Tsunade Senju who was known in her day, and I currently had no living relatives.

The line of questions began to get weird: the man, Itachi Uchiha, wanted to know if I was frightened at all that easily. That really was something, because I used to scare easily as a little girl - especially of ghost stories - but I wasn't all that anymore.

At least...not a lot.

"This one gets stranger," Tsunade said with a twitching corner of the mouth. "You believe in...witchcraft?"

Now THAT was something I never expected. Really, witchcraft? What was that place, a nest of voodoo, black magic and all that jazz that Haiti and its fellow poor Caribbean surroundings relied on? My answer was that it wasn't taught at the hospital, but you have to wonder where some of the miracles of medicine came from.

"Tsunade, I want to know more about the case itself," I said, but sadly, there wasn't a lot that I was given. Mr. Uchiha only wanted it short and straight to the point. The patient was his wife, and he himself was a sugar planter on the island of St. Sebastian. If I said yes to this job, it meant not only would I be paid well, but I would be able to swim, sit under a tree and enjoy a good drink on my days off. Nothing much but monitoring Mrs. Uchiha, whose condition was stated to be comatose likely due to a tropical fever, and that all the best doctors had done what they could.

Now that I was thinking about it, it didn't seem so bad. I said yes in a heartbeat.

~o~

I found myself on a plane and landing down in St. Sebastian in a week's time. I was prepared for the jet-lag, but when I touched down, I found out from the lush Antigua - when I took in the vivid turquoise waters and deep, dark greens of the jungles - that I was to meet my new employer at the boat docks, where we would take to St. Sebastian. I didn't understand why a boat was necessary after the long flight, but I didn't want to test the waters and question.

I simply did as I was told.

To be on these waters just as the sky was at its brightest for noonday, it was a dream come true in itself. Everything was as I imagined it would be. The skies connected to the waters like a scene from heaven. Pure, clean and simply magical. The purity was a contrast to the sapphire around my right forefinger, wrapped within the wings of the rosy hummingbird given to me by my mother before she died, but close enough to the sapphires that ringed the face of my watch, its leather band as white as the clouds overhead.

The wind was warm on my cheek. I was on cloud nine. I breathed in the salt of the mist. So beautiful...

"No, it is not beautiful."

I was startled at the voice that interrupted my thoughts. The man stood there: Itachi Uchiha. Taller than me, broad-shouldered as if he'd been in the army or military services, clad in a breezy white shirt tucked into khakis. His face was something you didn't see every day, and that included his long hair, black as a raven's wing, the bangs long enough to reach his chin, and was tied back below his neck. His nose and lips were perfectly aristocratic, his depthless onyx eyes accented with the deep lines slanted on either side of his nose. Really, he was a hell of a man, not too pretty-boy but not too masculine either.

I quickly answered him. "You read my thoughts, Mr. Uchiha." I had spoken to him briefly as soon as I was led to this boat before it was released to take off, and all he said was that he was glad I was here, because he did everything he could to get his wife the help she needed, so the outside of the island was needed - and what better than a nurse from home?

He shrugged with one shoulder. "It's easy to read the thoughts of a newcomer, Miss Uzumaki." His voice was low and rich, like velvet, and smooth like dark chocolate. But it was also hard with authority. "Everything looks beautiful simply because you don't understand." He nodded past my shoulder, and I turned to look past it to see the small fishes that leaped through the water. What was wrong with them?

"Those fish aren't leaping for joy, but fear," Uchiha answered. "Bigger fish want to eat them. Just as these so-called pure waters take their gleam from anything dead at the bottom. The salty aroma is really putrescent if you take too much into your senses."

I had been told my entire life that life wasn't perfect no matter how hard you try to make it that way, but I have never met a man like him who looked at things in a cynical light. Death, decay - all beneath such beauty like this? "You really don't believe that, do you?" I asked, somewhat disbelieved.

"I believe facts as they are," he said. "Everything good dies here, just like everything on the outside. Even the stars themselves. They light the sky, but sooner or later, one to many or all of them will go out whether the sun clears way or simply because their natural gases run out." He gave me one last hard look before he turned to leave me alone at the railing. I was still reeling when he was still retreating. For a moment, I considered going down below for a good drink to clear my head, but I couldn't.

No one had ever broken through to my thoughts the way he did. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me in a long time. Hinata, my best friend who was now an intern in her father's company, never could read my mind like Itachi Uchiha. I turned my back to him to continue looking out the endless horizon of blue, but he was still on my mind - mostly his words.

The cruelty and hardness in that soft, rich voice, and yet...something I like. He's very clean and honest, not like most men I heard about or even met at work or on the streets...

I wasn't developing anything personal for my boss whom I met only today - or was I? - but besides that cynicism and honesty, there was something in those ebony eyes that was very...sad.

Hurt.

~o~

When we docked for St. Sebastian, I was amazed at the poor but colorful housing. It gave this place such character that home didn't have for everyone. Palm trees reached for the skies. The people were mostly African American, but it was expected. I wasn't racist, by any means, but I couldn't help but see a number of white-skinned - either American or English, likely - and realized how I must stand out because I was from Japan.

But nobody looked at me twice.

Mr. Uchiha informed me that I could go on ahead to his estate, because he had to get back to the sugar mill where he was needed; he'd been in the mainland on some business that I didn't need to know, but that didn't worry me. After all, I was here only to look after his sickly wife.

I was yet to see the extension of Sakura Uchiha's illness besides being in a catatonic state that could have been the cause of a tropical fever, which was common in these parts.

My driver was a really nice man, carting me in his little jeep, explaining to me that the Uchihas came thirty-something years ago, starting with a Madara Uchiha. This was when an American man chose to abandon the property, only to be confronted by a Japanese businessman who was interested and refused to let it all go to waste. Eventually, his son took over when he was gone, followed by his grandson - none other than Itachi himself. But long before that, the "white man who came before the Uchiha was a descendent of those who brought the colored folks to the island below Ti-Misery."

"What is Ti-Misery?" I asked curiously. He chuckled.

"An old man who lives in the garden at Fort Uchiha." Which was originally the American's name. "With arrows stuck in him, and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face."

I clutched onto the edge of my leather seat in shock at the image of an old man who was in the Uchiha grounds, with arrows in himself and crying. "A-Alive?" I couldn't help but exclaim, but I calmed down when he assured me it was nothing of the sort. Thank God the Uchihas weren't barbaric.

"Oh, no, miss. He's just the same as he was in the beginning: on the front side of an enormous boat." So, he meant a figurehead. "The boat which brought the long ago fathers and mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat."

I had to try not to cry as I thought of all those people taken from their homes and abused, starved and so on, to work for others who were too lazy to do anything by themselves. Suffering never ended in the past, present, or even the future.

"But, they did bring you to a beautiful place," I told him with a smile that he returned, graciously accepting the positivity of the present instead of always living in a painful past.

However, I had to wonder: that figurehead...does Mr. Uchiha keep it because of his beliefs in suffering and death? Why is he like that?

~o~

Within thirty minutes or so, I found myself at Fort Uchiha. It was the most beautiful place I ever saw. Lush with flora, classical white architecture, a singing water fountain in the middle...but then I also saw none other than the figurehead of St. Sebastian the driver talked about.

He was right: the weeping face and the arrows to symbolize the suffering of the people who were brought here.

But aside from that, the gardens were...strangely dreamlike. Like I was in Eden. It seemed to have a life of its own, which also kept the old man with the arrows alive. My heart clenched as I imagined if he had really been living and watched everything pass him by. And speaking of hearts, I found myself admiring the metalwork of the gates that opened, seeing how the elegant swirls formed the shapes of hearts.

This great house - I was to know all the nooks and crannies, because this was nothing like Konoha. This was going to be bigger than the small apartment I had to work to make into my own home. It would be a while before I would pay my own rent again. This is until Mrs. Uchiha is well again. Don't think of it as permanent.

Little did I know that, in this house, things were going to get stranger than I'd ever anticipated.

Little did I know I would hear a confession that only madness could run from the lips of a sane person.

I found myself in my room, in love with the gossamer curtains of the windows and my own bed. The bed was covered with white, to warm but also to cool at night. I heard that the night could be humid. It was here that I would end up finding a brand new happiness deep through the heart - as well as the joy outside these walls.

Delightful, I unpacked and eventually got ready for dinner. I hadn't seen Mr. Uchiha since that afternoon, but I was told by the maid that I could go ahead and get settled in, and that Mrs. Uchiha had been taken care of for me, so I wasn't needed yet.

However, as I switched out of my breezy white blouse, tank and khakis, I thought it unusual since I saw nobody else in the hallway or in the gardens. Not even a chirp of a cricket.

Silence hung the atmosphere like it was really dead, as the owner of these lands had told me.

Soon I found myself in the only dress I owned for dinner, which was pale gold chiffon with pink, lavender and white flowers sequined on the bodice. The thin straps made me feel like I was really naked. I replaced my everyday crystal stud earrings for gold hoops embellished with tiny beads to match, and my long blonde hair was rearranged into the ponytail I preferred.

I burst with excitement as the manservant came to the doorway. "Miss Uzumaki? Dinner."

"Thank you!" I jumped up and hurried out of the room, eager to see my boss again, and whoever else might be there.

Review please, but no flames allowed. :)