Jones suddenly called out, "Look! I've found something!" The young man pushed his glasses up on his nose and impatiently shook his dusty blond bangs out of his eyes. Putting down the pick, Jones carefully turned over the stone in his hands. A perfect mold of what had once been a human face was imprinted into one side. Scraps of hair still clung to the rocky surface. As Jones examined the hair in the sunlight, the locks seemed to have a silvery sheen.
One of his colleagues, Davidson jogged over with a fine brush still in his hand. "What's that, a cranial imprint?" The brunette nodded. "Facial structure can't be more than, what, thirty, thirty-five years old? but look. Silver hair." Davidson gently lifted the stone from Jones's hands and inspected it with clear hazel eyes. He absentmindedly ran one gloved finger across the cheekbones, the wide eyes, and traced the rim of the open mouth, seeming as if it still screamed. The man was actually very handsome. "Mmm, I wouldn't even give this guy thirty. I don't think he's older than you, Jones. So...write down albinism as a possible trait."
Davidson handed the fossil back to his partner. "You actually found this down in that pit?" Jones nodded, grinning. "Yeah. There's a bunch of debris mold in there too, and that seems to be from the same period as him, which means-" "The rocks that were piled up here were what killed him," Davidson finished. "Maybe we'll find the rest of this fellow's body in there."
Setting the fossil face to one side after labeling it with a marker, Jones held up another find to the sun. The chain was almost entirely corroded away, eaten up by a hundred years of dust and decay. But the pendant, a strange symbol, was still in one piece. Red with rust, red as the sandy plains, it still glinted. He'd found it squished beneath the stone, around the neck of the man who had lived before the epic Battle of the Bijuu. Before a crazed man called Pein had nearly killed off every living thing in existence. Before he had somehow annihilated himself, his organization, the Bijuu, and all but a handful of people. In one fell swoop, a man named Pein had ended the era of shinobi.
Jones tied a string around the rusty pendant, not trusting its old rosary chain, and put it on his neck. It looked kind of nice, shining in the sun; the area's bold burning colors reflected off what was left of the steel.
As the symbol lay comfortably on his chest, somewhere deep inside of Jones, a being chained within his last possession burst out, out of the cage of indefinite pain and attacked this new form. It gave easily; this man had little willpower and never knew what hit him.
Hidan looked up at the sky.
He was free.