The thing about Hidan fucking him is when he does it, he thinks he's won. He clings tight, leaves crescent-marks dug into Kakuzu's skin with his fingernails and teeth, laughs and snarls and babbles into his partner's face. Always with the talking. Even when Kakuzu's the one catching, his partner is the one who falls apart. Which is kind of beautiful in its own sordid way. Kakuzu likes the slow collapse, the disintegration of what was there before, so he feels a certain communalism with Deidara, although he'd never say it and certainly in medias res Deidara, of all people, is never on his mind. Just Hidan, Hidan Hidan, in all his broken-glass jagged glory. His hair, colored the pale edge of a candle-flame. His large, strong hands. The hooded eyes red as persimmons, fresh-spilt blood, luck. The jet beads of the rosary.
So many people have died on the both of them. Not that it hurts, so much as it's just a surprise, even after all these times. Like touching one's forehead, rubbing dully at the sweaty dust-streaked skin and accidentally sticking a finger through a hole to poke at the ruined remnants of a brain. Which Kakuzu has seen shinobi do, now and again. Lose half their heads and live for a day or an hour or ten minutes more. And all things beyond that. That's what he thinks about, being fucked by Hidan. Carnage and destruction, everything he's seen. How different they are.
So many years. They're like starvation, they carve a person down to the bare essentials. Years on his mind, like wind shaping the rocks, into lurid shapes, unreal, dreamlike, and wholly strange. Things that are old become very fine, or they become trash. Kakuzu isn't sure of his partner's fate as of yet.
The sun bleaches Hidan to ivory, something fine and yellowed, long held in the world.
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The thing about fucking with Kakuzu is the man is strong.
Well, no shit; if he wasn't strong he wouldn't have survived to become an S-ranked criminal in the most highly dangerous conglomeration of missing-nin in the world, but even so. He's strong enough for it to stand out, in a cabal of the strongest.
Hidan wasn't that impressed, at first. He's got a lot of strength himself. But Kakuzu, he's got fucking finesse, and a surgeon's eye to go with it. A good enough eye to reattach severed arms, sinking fine stitches even into the nerves, enough to restore fine motor control and give back the use of a very uncommon bloodline limit. And that's only one of the really impressive things Hidan has seen his partner do, during the period of their acquaintance.
So Kakuzu knows the human body. Knows how to help it, how to hurt it. The first time Hidan saw the man lose most of his human shell, reduce himself to a flurry of black cord and searing eyes, he thought fuck. And then Kakuzu flung himself like a jungle cat, pulverizing enemies with sledgehammer blows, and Hidan looked at the corpses afterwards and bones had shattered under the force his partner unleashed. Bones had shattered, and some of the people had stretched or gone strangely shaped because none of what usually held them up was holding them up anymore, and when Hidan lifted a limb the broken shards pushed white and round and ghostly, pale shapes through the flesh. But finesse, still. His partner had torn apart his enemies without ever breaking the skin.
So, yes, Hidan wanted that. Some of that controlled power. Some of that monstrously directed force. The rapid swing of Kakuzu's limbs, delivering casual death blows, the yelps of shinobi as he clubbed them down like uppity puppies. A creature capable, like Hidan's god, of healing. But preferring to visit destruction. Yes, yes, yes he thought, and he wants a taste of that unbridled rage, to be swaddled in the typhoon, to feel the grind of bone on bone in his own body. Carnage pushing against his skin, and still not a drop of blood spilled. The skin still unbroken.
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They come upon her in a grim, once-hallowed place, and she seems a woman well-acquainted with the night. Her gaze is black, keen, unerring as a hawks, and Kakuzu has never seen a mortal creature so steeped in death. Soaked in it. The Nekomata scorches the air around her with the smell of burned flesh and blue fire.
The Nekomata's been around since everything began, and it's made her strange, too; in a way as odd as them. He can see it. He's has long practice at seeing things, at clear vision.
And it's made her tremendously tired. A human envelope shouldn't be forced to carry around that much raw energy.
She looks, as she delivers her battle cry, as though she is hoping that events will not unfold as she expects, and she looks as though her expectations are not great. Hidan says he wants to destroy everything and she looks at Kakuzu like she's expecting he'll yank down the mask and declare it all an elaborate joke. Kakuzu says she's the last one and she looks at Hidan like she's hoping he'll tap the scythe on the ground, laugh, shoot his mouth off. Just kidding, princess. Testing your reflexes. You pass.
But she doesn't pass. She falls, eventually, as she knew and he knew and they knew and she knew they knew she would, from the moment they laid eyes on each other.
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He wants to leave bloody tracks up and down her body. Hidan was here – a little message to whatever gods find her. In a perfect world he'd be sending her direct to his own, of course, but the world is so very fucking imperfect that he'll do the best he can and leave the rest to luck, chance, and predestination.
While it lasts, he loves fucking this bitch. He loves fucking this bitch up. He loves watching her unravel a little each time – but, no. Unravel is a soft word for a soft thing and Yugito is a hard woman. Like an icicle. So what he's doing is melting her, a little bit each time, and when she freezes again she's reformed. Something different, but still essentially the same: a dagger of frozen water, a cone like a special kind of knife, something formed in the cold and the clear, something sharp enough to pierce.
She keeps that core, cloaks it in pride and fatalism, and never looks at him. He hits her harder each time and that small aristocratic face flushes, the little mouth curdles with dislike, but she keeps coming back up. It's fun. He tries pushing her harder and she bounces back, scathed, the ice clouded, not the same. Marks made. Wear and tear. But even so, it's not like she ever breaks.
Hidan knows it's not gonna last. It can't possibly last. There's a limit, supposedly, to everything (not to his life, but that's another matter entirely – something special). A limit to how long he can twist an arm before it pops out of its socket. A limit to how much blood a sacrifice can lose before they collapse. A limit to how much she can take before she blows.
But at this rate, it looks like she's gonna die before the inevitable meltdown hits. And it surprises him, but the mystery is fun. So Hidan's okay with that.
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Yugito is most beautiful when she is looking away. Her profile is so sharp. The dark, severe mouth, the dark slanted eyes, the golden skin, the honey-colored hair that she keeps tied and confined. Straight on her face becomes masklike, frozen with regret and a slowly creeping torturous kind of fear. Straight on, she looks into her future, and all she sees is death. In profile she gazes upon a plethora of possibilities. All kinds of things that might-have-been.
Asked (as he has been asked), is it a quick death, Kakuzu would say (has said) quicker than some. For her, in the prime of her life, young and strong, it will be slow. It could be a mixed blessing, although he doubts that it is, from where she stands. Still, every moment where she still exists must count, however it's spent. He sees no reason to force her deeper in a mire of unhappiness. She does that well enough for herself. And although her death is an accomplished fact, he sees no reason that she should dwell on it so. Though that could be accounted for by his increasing distance to humanity, a gulf wider as each year goes by.
So while she is under him, he lets her look away. At the bluebells, nodding in the breeze; the beetle climbing up the bobbing stalk. He moves, and she reacts in almost complete silence. He smoothes his fingers over her torturously furrowed brow. She is so full of pride and rage, and he shades her eyes as though to protect her from temporary blindness, the kind that might comes on the snowfield, gazing unprotected onto a blazing expanse of white. And from looking at him, of course. He has no means to be kind but there is no reason to indulge in cruelty. Not with death roaring like a steam engine, rumbling down upon her, head-on.
He remembers a long time ago being caught by a hurricane. Picked up by it, spun and flung, easily as breaking a kite in a furious gale. The crazed winds picked up trees, too, splintered them into deadly weapons. When the storm dropped him he was unconscious and he woke up with a four-foot splinter of wood driven through his body. It had pulverized one of his hearts and a good fifth of his threads melted to slag when he dissolved the integrity of his form and slid free from the splinter, where it became a stake, pinning him to the ground.
It was a painful, terrifying event, the only thing he remembers for a long period, the closest to death he'd come in a long time. To be so powerless, flung about like a puppet by a breeze throwing a tantrum. He supposes that the memory holds some resemblance, perhaps, to what Yugito is now experiencing. A storm of events slipping out of her grasp, flinging her, will she or nil she. He has become the hurricane.
He was hungry, when he woke up, with that one heart destroyed. Absolutely empty. Needing food more than anything, at that one second. Starving.
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Hidan seems slightly enamored of their temporary traveling companion, if such a flighty word can be applied to his emotion, spiced with greed and smugness, hate and nihilism. Enamored is a sweet word for what's actually a scalding thing, thick as curry, redolent with smugness and pleasure derived from teasing and torment, but Kakuzu has entertained himself at times with observing his partner's stranger proclivities and asked to summarize the interaction in a word, that's how he'd characterize it. Enamored.
Kakuzu knows as an absolute fact that Hidan is not indifferent to anything, however he plays sometimes at pretending not to care. Rather, Hidan hates everything. He is offended by everything. But he is a creature of many facets, many contradictions. He possesses a shattered mind. It allows him to like and hate things at the same time. He can hate and be amused by things at the same time. And Yugito, she prompts both reactions in him.
This is why her forced comradeship with them on their little trek to her death, however shortly it may ultimately last, concerns Kakuzu. Hidan latches on to the most unsuitable things at times. Kakuzu himself is a case in point.
But perhaps he worries himself for nothing. His partner seems satisfied with his lot, and mostly indifferent that the girl must die; while she's within Hidan's reach the man will twist and wrangle her between his hands, and when called to, he'll do as commanded, and let her fall.
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What he wants her to learn, before the end: losing is acceptable, as is victory. But choosing not to play is admitting loss from the start, which is unacceptable.
Win or lose, the only penalty comes with sitting out. The thing is to play.
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The thing about Yugito is she knows she's gonna die and they know she knows and she knows they know she knows and so on and so on and so on, ad nauseum. But Hidan thinks that if somebody pushed her she would admit that she is actually not minding the whole thing so very much, or at least is not caring much either way, because she's a Cloud kunoichi and a pretty decent fucking soldier as far as these things go and those types are always kind of fatalistic. Expecting a death blow around every corner and, well, here they are. The ironic thing about the whole thing is that it's the fucking idealists, the fucking non-fatalists, the ninja who really want to fucking be something who go rogue and bail out, and then usually they get iced by their own villages, by their former teammates and teachers sometimes, and the whole fucking thing just compounds in hilarity. Fucking ha ha ha.
But, digression.
The thing about Yugito is she is going to die, no ands ifs or buts. The thing about Yugito is that she wants nothing. She wants to be left alone. She wants it to be fast. Hidan is going to stand on the King of Hell and chant his little chant and play his little part and watch her slip away, far ahead from him, into lands he wishes he could chart. The fucking unappreciative bitch. So he is going to have his fun and get as much juice out of her as he can squeeze in the limited time there is. And she will cooperate because she doesn't care.
The thing, the great thing, the defining thing about Yugito is that she wants nothing. So it works out really well, actually, in the end. Hidan has nothing to give.
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On the way, they stop in a town for a short while. The dingiest part of it, the seediest of the poor quarters, and Kakuzu orders them curtly to wait and disappears into a nondescript little warning. Hidan ventures after a woman selling dango and for the first time in days Yugito is left alone with her thoughts. It's a little bit shocking. If she were them, she wouldn't have let them out of her sight. But maybe it's all right because where would she go? The seal on her stomach is enormous, elaborate, and it spreads over her skin like a spider web. The cat's chakra for the most part is beyond her reach, and right now, she's what she sometimes wished to be: a normal woman. At the worst possible time, of course. But still.
She doesn't try to escape. She doesn't even really think about it, beyond the first move her mind makes in that direction. She just sits down on the curb and puts her chin in her hands, exhausted, wallowing in her own blankness. The seal itches on her skin. She thinks about being thirsty, and how she's not going to get away. It's really the end of the line. She closes her eyes and opens them, wanting to sleep.
She has her eyes closed when Hidan scuffles up to her again, holding three sticks of dango in a fist. He shoves her over on the curb just because he can and hunches beside her, sliding one soft, sweet round of dough off the end of a stick and pulping it between his teeth. His arm is a bar of heat against her. He smells like blood and sweat and the oil that waterproofs his cloak. Yugito does her best to ignore his obtrusive self, even when he transfers one of the sticks to his free hand and waves it in her face.
"Want it?" he says, poking her cheek with the end of the skewer, and Yugito jerks back, turns her head away. Hidan is sometimes just obnoxious as well as indulgently cruel. This is one of his most horrible characteristics.
"No."
"What? Why the hell not?"
He sounds put out with her, as if he's gone to a great deal of trouble to procure her a gift which she now proves ungrateful for. Yugito sighs, feeling stirred up, annoyed. "I hate dango," she says sullenly, unwilling to divest the slightest personal detail, no matter how inconsequential it might be.
Hidan looks at her incredulously. "What kind of crazy bitch hates dango?"
Yugito glares at him, and then glances away. He laughs. Finishes the sweets on his own. "Everyone in this shitty organization loves dango," he says. "It's practically all the fucking Uchiha eats."
It's peculiar that he's telling her this, as she's not even pretending to care. Yugito flexes her fingers against her skin. Wishes Kakuzu would hurry up and come out, and draw his partner's attention away from her.
"Hey. What's with you making that fucking face? I'm just trying to be nice."
She humps her shoulders and doesn't turn around. Hidan chuckles, a sound like the warning buzz of a rattlesnake, and grabs the back of her head. The base of her braid. He makes her turn and look at him and Yugito doesn't even really fight it, just glowers the whole time. His eyes are hooded, amused. "Yeah. Seriously, I'm such a nice fucking guy. You just can't see it."
Yugito jerks back against his grip and opens her mouth to say something cutting, which is when he kisses her, with a hot slide of tongue and light graze of teeth. He tastes a little like blood, but that's probably psychosomatic, and a lot more like dango, which probably isn't. The sweet isn't more to her liking, when it's just an aftertaste on his tongue, and neither is the kiss. Scalding and slow and sweet-flavored, and it all kind of winds up into one package, one sullenly-glowing ingot of hate when he pulls back for a breath. She knows she's never going to get that taste out of her mouth, now.
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The thing about Yugito is that she is so small. Lithe, and heavy with muscle, but small and woundable-seeming in a way Hidan isn't. In low light, thought, she looks carved of soapstone, in Hidan's way. Her hair pale, unbound and cobweb-fine. Small enough to cradle close, and Kakuzu enjoys the contrast of her skin to his, her nature to Hidan's. Her reserve against Hidan's dogged near-gentle persistence. Her hand braced against his shoulder, not hard – stop. Compare to Hidan's pull and complaint, his vortex of desire.
He stops, because she asks, and observes her bowed head, her eyes tracking, fixed on nothing. Almost, almost, almost he is the gentle one in this dynamic, and certainly he has the most patience. Enough, at least, to indulge one young girl.
"No," she says, when he slides his hand around to stroke the nape of her neck. So he stills, to enjoy studying her, the dark lips as though her mouth is berry-stained, the dark lining around her eyes, the dark nipples and dusky areola, standing out like ink stains against her pale skin.
Eventually, her aimless gaze wanders back to him. Knowing how he must appear doesn't phase him, and it doesn't seem to discombobulate her. When he moves his fingers again against her skin she says nothing, only lowers her head a little more, so her hair trails around her face.
"Tell me…" He shifts her closer, strokes the curve of her spine. Moves his fingers along the stitches he put in, to keep her alive, to be sacrificed later. As on Hidan, the contrast between her skin and his cord interests him. "Does the cat speak to you?"
Her head moves slightly. Not obviously, but he can feel her drawing away, the shifting muscle under her skin. He uses her silence to let cords steal out over her skin, small feelers sensitive to small changes.
"Sometimes," she says, expressionless. "In dreams."
By the tempo of her heart rate, he judges that's partly truth, at least.
"And recently?"
Instead of answering, she swaps him a question. "Does it hurt much?"
Kakuzu pauses, and then with his free hand he gives her hair a quick, hard ruffle. "Mostly, jinchuuriki aren't around to give feedback afterwards."
She frowns, he can hear it in her voice – "I answered your question."
"If you want answers, ask questions that have them."
She looks up at him, and there's a spark in her eye, the way fury might look from far, far away.
Silently, he pulls and adjusts her until her forehead rests against his chest. Breath ghosts warmly over his skin. With one hand against her neck and one against the small of her back, he says, "It seems terribly painful. But I doubt you'll be coherent long enough to worry much about it."
Besides, he guesses that she's the kind of person who can stand some pain. Yugito actually barks a hoarse little laugh.
Indulging himself, he sits and rocks her for a few minutes afterward, her silent, her heart rate down after the initial flare. Eventually she turns her head and glances up at him. "Don't," she says, toneless, hapless. "I'm not a child."
Wrong.
But, "No," he says, instead, guiding her a little closer.
This is currently how it exists for them. Favors for favors, half-truths freely given.
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She is going to die and that's the best thing about her. He can say anything, and it doesn't matter.
