Okay, back with the third and final addition to the Manicurist storyline-thingie! Nya, I'm ridiculously happy that you guys enjoyed Psychologist, so I sped up my creative muses with omelets and rainy days (don't ask) to bring you Guardian! Yay for breakfast food!
Ahem…anyway, this is a go-along story to Psychologist (my other fanfic), but you don't really need to read it for this fanfiction to make sense. These two have almost nothing to do with each other, except for a few references back and forth. But oh well, it still makes sense.
I warn you, Kakuzu may be OOC. But, that's the way I like him. XD He's a fun character to write that way.
Don't own Three Doors Down or the Goo Goo Dolls.
"Sorry, Hidan, I'm moving."
"WHAT?!"
Hidan's mind wandered as he stared out of the car window, watching the power lines swoop up and down. He groaned as he remembered what had happened the Friday before. Deidara, his best friend –since what, fourth grade?- had announced that he would be leaving Burbank and moving across the country the next day. Psh. The bastard. Waiting until the last day, totally surprising Hidan with the news. Here he was, heading to school, just to be alone. Great.
"Hidan? Hidan, honey, are you okay? You haven't said anything for the entire ride," a dark-haired woman said, keeping her eyes on the road as she drove.
He grunted. "Yeah, DeAnn. I'm fine," he answered routinely, moving his attention from the window to the back of her seat. DeAnn was cool, as far as foster moms went, but her inquisitive nature really ticked him off. Why did she care if he was quiet? "I'm tired, that's all."
She sighed and pulled up to the school. "You always say that, and it's always a lie," DeAnn replied, unlocking the car.
Hidan shouldered his backpack and let out the door. "I am tired," he argued, slamming the door shut. "Bye!"
XXXXXXXXXX
"So, you're new?" the bus driver asked, writing down something on a slip of paper.
Kakuzu sighed. No. He wasn't new; he had just moved to Burbank, but he had been going to school here for a while. "Uh, yes. I'm Kakuzu Taikii. I moved here a couple of days ago," he replied, choking down his sarcasm.
The driver motioned to the many rows of seats behind his own. "Alrighty, then, take a seat," he instructed.
The newcomer sighed, following the order. He absolutely hated this. Here he was, fresh out of Osaka, with limited (but functional) English, thrust into the Westerners' whacked-out culture; something he couldn't really grasp. It was okay for a girl to insult herself, but when someone else did it, they were immediately slapped. What sense did that make? And, to make things worse, people here followed stereotypes more than anything else. Not that Japanese people didn't do that, but it's a different story when the national language is your native tongue. In his current state, Kakuzu wasn't sure that he'd be able to correctly word a verbal comeback.
Picking an empty seat toward the back of the obnoxiously yellow vehicle, he pulled out his mp3 player and blasted some music. If there was one thing he liked about this culture, it was the music. Not the stuff that was basically just people talking with bass beats in the background, but the ones with instrumentals played by actual instruments and voices to die for.
In short, Three Doors Down and the Goo Goo Dolls.
Shifting his gaze out the window, he stared at his translucent reflection, then at the street, and then both. How was this entire thing going to blow over…?
When the bus screeched to a halt, Kakuzu filed out with the rest of the passengers. He figured he would follow the crowd until he knew what he was doing.
If only it were that easy. As he walked into the school doors, people of all shapes, sizes, and skin tones pushed and shoved past him, intent on getting to their belongings before the tardy bell rang. He sighed as he headed down the hall, looking for the locker assigned to him: 1379. Figures it had to be down at the other end of the hall.
Opening the door to his new metal storage container, Kakuzu accidentally hit someone standing at the locker next to his. "Hey, watch it!" a sharp voice scoffed.
Kakuzu closed his door a bit. "Sorry…" he apologized, watching as the other kid flipped him off. He was a very peculiar-looking person: unmistakable white hair, probably shoulder-length, slicked back, with an odd pendant hanging from a chain around his neck and light purple eyes. Were all Americans this bizarre-looking?
"What are you staring at?" he asked gruffly, slamming his locker shut. "Dude, fuck off." With that, he turned and walked away.
The other boy stood there, dumbstruck. He hadn't understood half of what that kid had just said to him, but something told him that it wasn't too courteous. Taking a few things from his locker, he closed it and headed to homeroom, where he was supposed to get his schedule. Maybe today would work itself out once he knew what he was supposed to do.
"So, you're Mr. Taikii, I presume," a gaunt, pale teacher said, getting down to Kakuzu's eye level as he sat down in homeroom.
Kakuzu blinked and nodded. "Yes, I am," he answered as politely as his vocabulary would let him.
The teacher scoffed, and handed him a folded-up piece of paper. "This is your schedule. Don't lose it."
Unfolding and reading it, the newcomer frowned. He couldn't read romaji. This would be a problem. Ugh, more things to worry about. "Um, miss?" he asked, raising his hand, "I can't read this."
The teacher, who had begun to walk away, turned around. "What, you're illiterate? Stupid?"
"Eh, no, but…I just can't read this," he replied innocently. "It's, um, not in my writing."
"Well, of course it's not in your writing. We type it up on a computer and give it to you here in America. What do you do?" she retorted, obviously trying to humiliate him.
Kakuzu turned a shade of pink. Try telling a sadistic teacher that you don't read Arabic runes without a full understanding of English. "But, I-"
The teacher, angered, slammed her hand down on the top of his desk. "But nothing! If you can only read your own handwriting, then you shouldn't be in middle school at all! So, you're obviously trying to mess with my head. WELL, IT AIN'T WORKING OVER HERE, YOU GOT THAT?!"
"Janice, calm down," another teacher soothed from behind here. He was tall, partially tan, and had an authoritive voice. "He's from Japan, remember? He means that he can't read the Arabic symbols that we use here in the States. They use different runes over in the Far East, right?"
Kakuzu nodded, though he hadn't quite picked up all of what the man had said.
"Unfortunately, we don't have all the computer programs we'd need to print out a schedule for you in kanji, so we'll just have to assign you someone who can guide you through your first week or so. By then, everything should be routine enough for you to handle." The male teacher scanned the classroom quickly. "Ah, Hidan," he said, pointing to the white-haired kid with whom Kakuzu had hit earlier that day, "you need some responsibility. How about you help Kakuzu here get to know this place? I'm sure you'd be the best person for the job."
Hidan grunted. "Yeah, sure," he replied, apparently reluctant. "Why not?"
XXXXXXXXXX
Promptly after Hidan had gotten home that day, he threw his backpack off to the side and stomped his way into his room. Plopping himself down on the bed, he groaned. Good god Jashin, had it been an annoying day. First, some know-nothing cunt slams his locker door on his (Hidan's) head. Then, that damned heathen vice principal tells him to follow around the know-nothing cunt. "You guys have the same schedule, so it won't be too hard to show him around." Tch. He expects Hidan to believe that? He's just trying to get him agitated because Deidara isn't there to back him up.
The mention of his friend in his thoughts made Hidan's blood boil. That damned new kid had sat in all of Dei's normal places, like he was trying to replace him. That was probably why Mrs. Olba had lost her cool back in homeroom; the blond loved pushing her buttons and tricking her into doing stupid things. The new guy had even had the nerve to take Dei's normal lunch seat. "I want to get to know you. Maybe we can be friends." Yeah, right. He wanted to piss Hidan off, was all. Irritation had a vessel, and it was a black-haired, seriously tanned, and tall with HUGE green eyes, especially for an Asian. Irritation also had a name, and it was Kakuzu.
Taking deep breaths to calm himself, he got out of bed and searched around under his bed for something. Feeling the cold metal in his hand, he pulled it out slowly, even religiously. The one thing that DeAnn could never know about…
XXXXXXXXXX
Kakuzu slammed the door shut when he got home. "Tou-san! Dad, I'm home!" he yelled out, heading into the living room.
"Oh, you're home," his father replied from another room. "What took so long?" he asked, heading into the living room as well. "Was the bus late?"
"Iie, we just had a lot of stops to make. There's a lot of people on our route," Kakuzu answered, turning on the T.V. and channelsurfing. "School's pretty big, too. And diverse. I don't think I've ever seen that many ethnicities in one place before."
"Mm-hn. So, do you like it here?"
"Tch. No. Everything's screwed more than a cold onsen, and absolutely no one wants anything to do with me. How long are we going to stay here?" Kakuzu asked, as a yellow sponge came out of an odd-looking pineapple with portholes on the television screen.
His dad sighed. "As soon as I find them," he said after a period of silence. "As soon as I find and eradicate them."
Note: Whenever Kakuzu talks to his dad, it's all in Japanese. I put it in English simply because I don't speak Japanese fluently yet, and I know most of you don't, either.
Anyway, for those of you who've read my other AU fics, you can see that there's a change in the way I write. Instead of simply following one person around (i.e. I only wrote about what Kisame thought, saw, and speculated about in Manicurist, and I only wrote about what Sasori thought, saw, and speculated about in Psychologist), I'm telling about both Hidan and Kakuzu's points of view. Without doing that, this fanfic would be truly one-sided, and much less of a story. Please bear with me, and when you see the line of X's, it means there's a character change. Okay?
And, that brings me to the burning question- should I continue this one? I'm thinking about it, and although I have a rough storyline planned out, I don't know if it'd be of any interest to you guys. You tell me.