Hidan
He couldn't remember. Why couldn't he remember?
Hidan checked his ropes again. He had no idea why; he'd never done rope climbing before in his life. He had no idea what ropes did what. Still he checked. It was a thing to be doing while he lost his mind on the side of this mountaintop, alone. He tried to remember why he was climbing this thing while he was at it.
His arms and legs were weak and getting weaker. Still Hidan checked the ropes, instead of doing anything constructive like use the last of his energy to not fall. His grip slipped. Hidan twisted to reach out for the mountain, but it was miles away. And the ropes were loose, after all his checking! Why hadn't he seen they were loose?
Hidan's heart beat against his chest so hard that his throat hurt. It was trying to kill him, or at least it felt like it. Hidan tried to tear open the suit he was suddenly wearing, remove the collar that was choking him, but his hands got tangled in the fabric and could not seen to get enough of a grip for anything.
There was a bird. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful that it had to be the Magic Bird which lived on top of the mountain. Sure enough, he saw ladybugs crawl out from under its feathers to clean its wings. Hidan needed to get that bird's help. He needed to…
Not die, first of all. Hidan suddenly remembered to pull the cord of his parachute, and he did so just as he saw the first of the zombies moving in for the kill. You asshole! Why'd you pull the parachute? he screamed at himself as he tried to cut the line. It was no use. He fell so softly that he might have been lowered on a giant feather pillow. The parachute had feathers, actually. He was. Hidan wanted this to hurt. He ought to get to the ground quickly before the zombies came, he wanted to get there at fucking Mach 9, but the giant pillowchute wouldn't let him. He scratched at his skin, trying to make it hurt enough to beat the zombies.
There was a scream as he ran someone over. The zombies tore away the pillowchute, freeing Hidan to run back and check. There, on the ground, was something utterly crushed, trampled, split open so that it was barely possible to identify it as human. It was still oozing blood from a grisly head wound.
Hidan looked again, and saw it wasn't blood. It was hair. He fell to his knees. It was all his fault. If it wasn't for him and that giant bird who'd given him the parachute, Nagato would still be alive. Hidan felt a zombie behind him. He bent forward over Nagato's ruined body, waiting for it to bite. It was what he deserved.
Huh? Nagato held something in his ruined hand that Hidan hadn't noticed before. It looked like a remote. Hidan screamed and fell backwards, scrambling on useless arms and legs to get away from this, this, horrible thing! Hidan, and everything else, was now on fire. Hidan had been too late to stop Nagato from getting the bombs. Why the fucking shrieking lunasalts was Nagato getting bombs?! What's happening?! Why don't I remember? Hidan tried to remember what was going on. What was going on? What was true and what was false? He tried to look past somebody to see the book he was in. He strained to his fullest, pressed himself to the ground, and lunged to either side as far as he could. It didn't work; no matter which direction he tried to peek in, Hidan couldn't see which page of the story he was on, or even the chapter. What were his lines?!
Kakuzu drove up with a truck of refrigerators. "Sign here," he read off from a note on his forearm. He looked expectantly at Hidan. Hidan's heart was trying to kill him even more badly. What was his line?!
Itachi shoved a paper under his nose. Hidan tried to read it without Kakuzu seeing. "Best of luck," he read. "Hope you get to the shark safely with no leakage."
Kakuzu rolled his eyes. Hidan cringed. He'd gotten drunk with Nagato the night before, okay? And Nagato was dead now, so he wasn't going to regret that. Kakuzu drove away without further comment.
Hidan turned to thank Itachi, but Itachi wasn't there. A pile of giant carnivorous ants was. The Ground Birds carried them in their feathers for cleaning purposes, Hidan knew. The pile rushed forward at him, and Hidan's heart strained to make the death blow as the ants invaded Hidan's body. They were everywhere, tearing him to pieces and swarming into his nose, mouth, and ears. Hidan's eyes burned with ants squeezing in between his eyeballs and sockets. He was in Hell. He'd let the zombie bite him, and now he was dead and in Hell. Hidan tried to accept his eternal punishment even as his nostrils stretched wider than should be physically possible, accommodating ever growing numbers of ants.
Sometime later, the ants were gone and Hidan stared up at an angel. His face was hidden by the clipboard he held, but Hidan could see the set of his shoulders and hear the occasional disapproving "Hmm…" and even more disapproving "Mm-mm" as the angel made notes on the clipboard. Hidan summoned up all of his remaining strength and generated the most piteous whimper imaginable.
The angel lowered the clipboard. He wore a solid black cloak and a spiky orange hairstyle. He looked stern and disapproving at first, but smiled politely at Hidan. "Hello," he said. "We're auditing the place."
The angel gestured out with his arm at the rest of his team. There was a fat guy, a guy with long hair, a guy with two ponytails (but the front one covered the opposite side of his face from Deidara), a bald guy, a rugged-looking guy with another spiky orange hairstyle who was currently liberating squirrels, and a stick figure in a black hat. They all wore regulation black cloaks, and all had orange hairstyles, except of course for the bald one and the one with a hat.
Hidan looked up at the sound of pencil scratching against paper. "If you require legal counsel, your court-appointed attorney should be along shortly." The angel moved on.
Hidan looked to his left. A giant carnivorous ant was on his shoulder , looking at him. It waved its antennae at him. Hidan managed a weak wave. "Um, hi."
Several minutes later, Hidan cracked open his eyes to find out why the room was so hot, and why his heart was trying to murder him. He threw off the covers, remembering too late that they were the only thing covering his chest, and he was in female form. It didn't matter; he rolled off the bed and crouched on the floor, breathing hard. The heat seemed to pour off his skin, but despite that, he was shivering.
The blankets rustled behind him. "Hidan?" asked a worried sounding voice. Hidan remembered he'd stayed in Konan's room to comfort her. "Are you all right?"
"It's alright, I'm fine. I dreamed about lawyers, that's all." Hidan's breath was starting to edge back under his control, and his heart was calming down. He stood up with great effort, and slowly stumbled in the direction of the bed, falling into it when his legs hit the side. "And zombies. It's okay though."
"Zombies." Konan sounded like she was reading very much into that. "Was Yahiko there?"
Hidan tried to remember. "He might've been a lawyer. Why?"
Konan tilted her head. "He was a lawyer in the middle of a zombie infestation?"
Hidan shook his head. "No, no. It was shitty, like I was having every nightmare at the same time. I was falling, and zombies, and I forgot my lines, and something painful, and then lawyers. My body wasn't working right the whole time, and the lawyers did not look happy." At least, he thought they didn't. He seemed to remember displeased sounds and grim, dutiful looks. Hidan shivered and thanked whoever that he'd never been in legal trouble. Lawyers sounded scary.
Konan laid a hand on his shoulder, guiding him back to bed. It was then that Hidan realized what he had said. "Oh. Every nightmare at the same time. Shit."
He laid down and dragged the covers back over himself, sighing. An overwhelmed feeling rose in him, and his eyes started to leak. These weren't the kind of nightmares he could handle. He couldn't fix everyone's problems. All he could do was try to get back to sleep. That was all he could realistically do, when every instinct he had screamed at him to make the bad signals go away. Was this what it felt like to be outmatched? He had only ever felt this way once before in his entire memory.
"Hey, Konan?" he asked through sniffles.
"Yes?"
"Hi - history time." Hidan caught his breathing and brought it back under control. "20 years ago-ish, there was a devastating thing that happened. It's called 9/11, after the date it happened on. It was an attack against the whole country, so it rattled everyone in the whole country."
He shivered, cold sweat beading on his skin. "It was the worst fucking month of my life, the month after that. Maybe more than a month. It hurt so bad, I can hardly remember anything except agony. I spent that whole time hiding as far as I could from everyone, but I couldn't get far enough. Even in the middle of the forest, the cumulative noise was just fucking too much. I didn't see anyone except Kakuzu, who made sure I didn't literally die, but it was like… So much fucking noise.
"And I couldn't do anything. Everyone, a whole country, screaming to their gods for like months on fucking end. That's how rattled I mean." He shivered horribly, shaking the whole bed. "And that's the only other time I couldn't do anything." Hidan resumed his half terrified, half hurt crying. Mostly terrified.
Konan said nothing. What could she say? She lay down and closed her eyes, praying not to fall asleep. If she fell asleep, she knew the enormity of what she'd done, how much she had hurt everyone, would take a physical form and chase her endlessly. Sometime during her so far sleepless night, Konan had realized something for the first time, and furthermore, she had realized that it was the first time she was even thinking of it. She was thinking of how happy and carefree the clones had looked, before she met them. Why had she never thought of their happiness before? And worse, why did Hidan have to pay for what was rightfully her sin?
Hidan drew in a deep, trembling breath. "Ow." Something inside him hurt, not in a dull achy way like everything else hurt, but in a sharp twinge. That sharp twinge awakened his senses, reminded him of reality's existence. "Hurts." It went away, as all sharp twinges do. As all things do. He hadn't forgotten that, had he? No, Hidan decided, it was not he who had forgotten.
"Konan?"
She wedged one eye open. The chances that she could do whatever he would ask were low, but it was the least she could do to try. She cursed herself for not having the energy now to attempt an apology. She couldn't even take the first step to earning forgiveness. The thought (it couldn't be a hope, she shouldn't hope for that) that he might give it to her anyway was of little consolation.
Hidan raised his hand and settled it on her cheek, began to trace the curve of her brow. His hand changed as he did so. It became a little larger, warmer, heavier. Konan sighed involuntarily. For all the similarities, there were real differences between his male and female forms. In female form, he was good to sit with and commiserate. That wasn't what she needed or wanted now. The hand currently tracing her jawline was the hand of a protector, someone who could fend off terrible things and give her a moment of rest. It was also pleasant in its own way.
His hand stopped, and lay warm and solid against her cheek. Even in the darkness, she thought she could see, faintly, his eyes looking into hers. Hidan took a deep breath. This may blow up in his face, but no matter what, he had to try.
"Talk to me," he asked of her.
That was a hard one. Hadn't she done enough talking already? But because he asked, she would try. She nodded.
Hidan tried to think of something easy. "Talk to me about...something good. That guy you mentioned taught you guys. What's his name?"
"Jiraiya sensei." Konan was surprised at how easy it was to open her mouth and speak of him. Alone, in the dark, with nobody to overhear, her heart beat with the sudden desire to talk about and confess everything. The desire brought up memories of Yahiko. He was the only person she'd ever shared hushed whispers with before, in quiet and solitude. Strangely enough, this memory only increased her desire.
The first memory of Jiraiya sensei to float up in her mind was one of the strangest. "He was powerful, a Sage. He'd learned from the toads, so he called himself the Toad Sage. He made us dress in frog costumes once." She giggled. The warm hand on her cheek felt amused too. How she knew that, she couldn't have said. "The others looked adorable in their little frog costumes. Sensei just looked...different. It hid his huge, white ponytail, and the green clashed with the red clothes he usually wore. It didn't look right on him. Yahiko wore it well, though." She took a sudden breath, which hissed between her teeth. Speaking of this was bittersweet. Bitter, because such small and personal memories were supposed to be shared with those closest to her heart, and they weren't. Sweet, because they were supposed to be shared, and having any other person know this part of her history took a weight off Konan's heart. She hadn't realized how vast the burden of carrying their shared past all by herself was.
She continued sharing everything she could think of about Jiraiya sensei. The way he had made them grilled fish, and how good it had tasted after so long of stealing bread to survive. The way he hung up their clothes to dry, and gave them sleeping spaces of their own, and required them to be asleep at certain times. They had made places to sleep on their own before and kept a somewhat normal sleep schedule, but having someone require it made it different. Nagato confided at some point that Yahiko had spent the first week crying quietly every night. Nagato also confided at some much later point that he'd silently joined in after a while.
She told Hidan about training, which had been simultaneously surprising and familiar and terrifying and amazing. She told Hidan about their first successful defense against hostile ninja, when Jiraiya sensei had first seen Nagato's Rinnegan. Konan spent the next several minutes silent and drawing strength from Hidan's warm hand. The memory of how it had all started with her needing protection was bitter and poisonous. Could Hidan make it less noxious? After a few minutes of recovery, she told him of that part of the incident. Hidan exhaled slowly, covering her face with warm air that smelled of meat and sweet things. It was...she didn't know what it was. But she did continue talking without having to draw more strength from his hand.
She burst out quietly guffawing when she tried to tell Hidan about Jiraiya sensei's not-so-good attempt to teach them something about contact with the opposite sex when they were 11. It was ironic, she told Hidan. He probably could have told them any number of esoteric, perverse, or otherwise unusual things, but when he tried to be serious and stick to the basics, he could barely manage to get a word out. He'd spent the whole attempted talk with a red face. Konan had slipped her teammates notes asking for a secret meeting when they were supposed to be training on their own, and there she had told them what she knew of how animals mated, adding in reasonable thoughts based on what she already knew and what Jiraiya sensei had mentioned. This was much less embarrassing and substantially more effective than what Sensei had tried. The ball of noxious material in her chest broke up and dissolved away. She had never remembered this before. So, even back then, had she been more than a little girl in need of saving? It was amazing to consider.
Hidan chuckled while Konan reconsidered her entire perspective on herself. "Hey," he started. "My turn?"
"Alright."
"I'll start at the beginning." Hidan sighed and brushed her hair back while he remembered. "My first memory ever is Kakuzu's face. I was curled up, I think. Like a little scared ball. I don't know if I was scared, or...whatever. Either way, there was this hand on my shoulder all of a sudden. Feeling that was like waking up from a dream. Like your mind just goes Snap!, and bam, it's aware of the outside world, and everything that your mind was making up for itself before just disappears, like that. So I can't really remember before, but I remember that, and as soon as I felt it I looked up and there was Kakuzu. He musta been concerned, not that he would admit to it. Or, maybe he would. I was eight and curled up with my head in my knees on the side of a road, after all. No shame admitting you're concerned about something like that."
Hidan smirked. "He got a whole fuckload more than he was asking for, anyway. He asked me some basic concerned questions, like why was I on the side of the road, was anything seriously wrong, where were my parents. We pretty well established that I had to be some kind of runaway or something, and he offered to take me into town to maybe visit the police and get me returned. I...bit his arm. I did. Really, really hard. I don't even remember doing it. I just remember having my teeth in his arm, and feeling like I didn't want him to get anything sorted out. I managed to convince him not to do that, and somehow, don't ask me fucking how, I managed to get him to let me crash at his place."
"This Kakuzu seems to be kinder than the one I remember," Konan said.
Hidan rolled his eyes, snorting dismissively as well so Konan got the message. "It's really hard to be like your crew in this world, okay? The expectations are all different. Someone who acted all cold and unfriendly would stick out like a sore thumb in a room of quadruple amputees. Just can't be that here.
"So yeah, he probably didn't want to, but niceness lessons stick with you, so he did just because. It was pretty great." Hidan went silent.
Konan felt like she knew that kind of silence, which was puzzling. Why would Hidan need to draw strength from her? She snuck a hand out from under the covers and, carefully maneuvering around Hidan's arm, put her hand against the side of his face. After she brushed behind his ear a few times, his ear flicked, and he started to speak again.
"It was...fuck. I can't figure out how to describe it." Hidan chewed the inside of his cheek. "It was like...like something completely new. Sleeping on his couch with a blanket and everything felt weird, and kind of different, and I don't think I'd felt like that before?" He groaned. "You know how lying in bed feels when you're just coming out of sleep, and how it feels totally different when you're really awake? Like that, somehow. I, um. I cried." His face tightened, in what Konan imagined was a defensive look. "I don't know fucking why. Something from before, maybe."
Konan's breath took a sudden hitch. Hidan heard. "Whazzit?"
"Before." That word was acquiring more and more meaning with each day. "You have a Before too. I didn't piece that together until just now."
"A Before?" Hidan queried.
"Yes." Konan explained, "Ever since I arrived here I've thought in terms of Befores. There are dividing lines in life, moments that split everything into Before and After. I have...3 Befores. I have Before my parents were killed, Before Yahiko died, and now Before I died." She realized she had started petting Hidan's hair, and elected not to stop. "The three of us...we were apart. We had that experience in childhood, that nobody else did.
"But you… You've had one too." It didn't feel as different as she expected to acknowledge this aloud. Had she always known they had a connection, and not known that she knew?
"Yeah," Hidan followed, stunned. "I do. But it's different, because I don't remember anything before that. I just think of it as the beginning. My first memory."
"It's still there," Konan consoled. "If you can cry for no reason, that's proof that it's still there. Just because you don't remember your Before doesn't mean it's gone. It's there. It's here." She moved her hand down to press it against his chest.
Hidan's heart beat strongly against her hand. He said nothing, but tapped her beside her eye twice. They were quick, businesslike taps. He then moved his hand to cover her chest too.
Time stopped; the outside world ceased to exist. Her heart beat once, twice, three times against Hidan's hand. Konan heard her own words echo around the dark cocoon she shared with Hidan. She heard herself saying, very clearly, that as long as a Before was remembered somehow, it was not truly gone.
Hidan occupied himself while she thought about things by purring. Now he was in business. It was so funny, how people almost always came up with their own answers. But it's hard to interrogate someone you can't see or feel, so he could understand why some outside service might be required. And, as a side benefit, hopefully she would feel less alone. Stories were good for that.
Hidan's purring deepened. Heh. That means it took a day to get Kakuzu hooked. I crashed on his couch for one night, and then the next day I got him to tell me about what he did for a living, and he told me that story about the first time he scammed a casino. I wasn't just crashing at his place after that. I should read more often.
He took his hand back so he could reach out and pull her closer. Konan ended up curled against his chest, which made him feel very tired. He was sinking, and fast. "Should tell stories more often…" he mumbled, before sinking into the depths of sleep.
Konan
Somewhere inside Konan, in a little dark space, there was a feather. It floated above a liquid, twitching this way and that, following passing air currents. Eventually, though, it drifted down to the surface of the liquid, which never passed and only slowly changed. As a constant, the liquid lay there, for when the passing currents stopped blowing and everything settled. The feather settled onto the surface.
The oil slick began its work at once, oozing through and around the thin, translucent filaments. The feather began to sink, and more tar flowed over it, encasing its delicate fibers in heavy blackness. The feather sank, more and more blackness piling up around it, although it had already been covered at the surface. The black, grimy, smeariness thickened until the feather stopped falling and lay there, buried. Each filament broke apart from the rest, and the tar oozed between. The griminess was heavy, and pressing, so it was inevitable that it should press its way into the feather's fibers. The feather, so silvery and light in the air, filled with grime, drowned in stickiness. It became heavy and dirty, inside and out. The filth replaced all possibility of flight, and the feather resumed falling, falling…
Konan lay against Hidan's chest, and sank into the depths with him. She did not dream of pain, as she had expected. Instead, she dreamed of suffering. Being unable to move, and failing to keep up. Here an arm, there a leg, suddenly broken, and she could never remember if they had always been broken or if they had only recently become so. In all of her dreams, her path tilted to the right no matter how hard she tried to walk straight, much like a plane crashes despite trying to stay up. It came to a head in the dream where she was trying to dig books out of the walls of a hospital, and actually crashed through one of those walls. She spent a very long dream there in the twilight beyond, trying to move but always dragging around in circles. The twilight became horizon light and the colors of a sky, and all was tilting every which way, and she was falling…
There were also dreams of accusation, in which paper figurines of her were being ripped to shreds in Konoha for some reason, but she couldn't remember it, and nobody would tell her what she had done. And the sky was a sickly green, which is how she knew they were in Underground Konoha instead of the normal one, and her sentence was to stand beneath an upside-down mountain of cuboid blocks waiting for them to eventually fall and crush her. All the blocks were labeled with their color and a number which corresponded to the color; she catalogued all the colors, and built an inventory of how many blocks there were of each. The worst part of the punishment, which broke her heart after a while, was that no matter how hard she tried and no matter what angle she used, she would never be able to count the blocks on the inside of the mountain. With her broken right wing pulling her out of the air, there was nothing she could do to change this. So she circled the mountain and watched, waited, hoped, for any part of it to come crashing down so she could finally take a look.
There were dreams of sickness, too. These ones overlapped - her eternity beneath the cube mountain was exacerbated by a mounting fever and her broken wing swelling up so that it was twice as large as her and she could not move a finger without screaming, for example. Her broken wing in that one did not make a sharp pain when she tried to move; there was no help coming for her, not even in that form. Instead it generated a sledgehammer blast that convinced her she really had been smacked across the face, and the rest of the time it ached all the way down to the bone. The sickness was inside. She had no dreams where she tried to vomit, but she did have a dream where she switched bodies with Hidan and felt for herself the horror of straining to get out of his body and escape from beneath the ground, but never being able to. It was exhausting, but she was too fearful of what might happen to try escaping from his shattered body through sleep, either.
Konan wandered up from sleep after this dream, but did not reach full wakefulness, so she was not aware of it. All that happened from her still-dreaming perspective was that she was suddenly paralyzed and in a bed with Hidan. She burned energy to overcome the paralysis enough to flop her hand against his chest. "Mm?" he mumbled.
"Curshhhed," she drawled. Her mouth was partially paralyzed too. "Jasshhhn?"
"Nah," he yawned. "Mm. 'M here 'cause 'e died. No curse. There's 'ay out."
"Oh." Jashin-sama did not curse his followers with endless immortality. This was a good thing, and it meant somebody was not trapped. The strangeness aroused her suspicions. Konan might've woken up from the shock of something good happening, except she fell back into sleep after getting an answer and promptly forgot how to be suspicious. She wondered what the way out was, and searched for it in vain. The ground was filling with tar. No chance.
The rest of her sleep was deep, but not healing. Between dreams, her heart was more active than it should have been. She was going to feel as if there really was dirt ground into her flesh the next morning, upon waking.
Hidan wasn't going to feel any better, but something was different for him. He dreamed about the ants in his eyes again, and wondered. Hadn't that happened before? He also dug for fossilized plants in the La Brea tar pits, and fell in, and hadn't that happened before? Even when he was away in completely different dreams, such as the one where he kept trying to catch a cloud with a coat hanger, a strong sense of familiarity permeated everything. It had all happened before. Futility, aches, all of it, he felt like he was going to explode with the sense of knowing it from somewhere. He beat his hands against a wooden door (curse him for making it stronger with his words!) and slicked a staircase with blood as he tried to escape a rising feeling of something about to erupt. It baked the air and glowed with lava light and chanted Before…
Before, Konan whispered. Before. It meant something, or it might have, once upon a time, somewhere far far away…
Before. It was useless, but it might once have had meaning, so she kept whispering it. Before. What had it once meant? She held onto it, repeating it like a chant. There was no tar now, but liquid rock instead. Konan could feel herself being obliterated, but only from a great distance, as if she was watching a nature documentary where some gazelle was eaten. That was how she perceived the searing heat. Even her words were stolen by the liquid rock. She knew not whether they disappeared, or emerged elsewhere. It was of no concern.
She was only concerned that she should try to fly, and she wanted to try to fly, but even though the rest of the magma was surging upward she was still falling through it and could not spread her wings…
Back in the waking world, their dark cocoon filled with the sound of rustling. Giant shapes snapped into place and flicked outwards, knocking a lamp to the ground and scratching the ceiling. They also threw the blanket off the bed, bringing relief to Hidan's bright red, sweaty skin. The walls were scratched, the carpet ripped. Something large and powerful appeared in the dream worlds of all the other sleepers there that night.
Konan was wrong; she could.
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