Chapter One

His scythe was nowhere to be found, and his clothes were all tattered. Dried blood and dust covered him from head to toe, sticking to every part of his skin, which was now also littered with stitches. It felt like he had been revived, raised from his earthly prison, free to wander the earth again and do God's bidding.

Hidan laughed hoarsely because he could. Never had he imagined that he would have missed the sky so much. The colours, the light, it all created such a stunning and vivid picture. He stretched his arms to the sides, because he could, and basked in the glory which was freedom.

Kakuzu's monster, a mask Hidan did not remember, started to crawl away. It dragged itself forward so slowly, and looked truly pitiful.

"Hey," Hidan called after it. "Where are you going?" Could those things even talk? Could it hear him? It showed no sign to have registered Hidan at all, and so he walked towards it on wobbling, unsteady legs – weak by malnourish – and touched its back. Kakuzu's threads had always had a disgusting texture, slick and yet rough at the same time, but Hidan made sure to grab the threads still to stop the creature.

The monster ceased its crawling, and turned around to look at him with the soulless eyes of the mask. All of Kakuzu's masks had portrayed different emotions, from Hidan's understanding. Looking at the white mask with the wide empty eyes, and the absurd human shape of it, he read despair. But it said nothing.

After a prolonged eye contact with the mask, Hidan suddenly wondered why it was there. Following his burial, Hidan had been sure that Kakuzu would kill all of the brats and then come and get him. He had never once doubting his partner's abilities. But then time had passed, he never knew how much, and his faith had started to waver. Maybe Kakuzu, merciless and cruel as he was, had decided to leave Hidan in his hole. That thought had made him just as furious as it had made him frightened. And maybe, he had realized, Kakuzu had lost.

At the broken eye contact, the monster started to crawl away again, and Hidan decided that he might as well follow. Weak in body, it would be for the best to have a partner. Furthermore, there was nothing Hidan loathed as much as loneliness.

It was a good thing that the monster crawled at such a slow pace, Hidan thought. He kept up mostly by leaning against trees. He needed food, and his strength back, if he ever hoped to serve God again.

At the sighting of a rabbit, Hidan's eyes went wide with hunger.

"Kill it," he ordered the monster, but his words did nothing but scare away the animal. Angered, Hidan grabbed the monster's threads tightly. "Listen, I need food, seriously, so you've got to help me, got it?" he ranted feverishly against the creature. His voice was hoarse and filled with a hunger-induced panic, yet the creature showed no sign of understanding.

Gritting his teeth, Hidan let go of the threads. His stomach growled at him, but he could do nothing to help. Even a vegetable, or a fruit, would be welcomed at that moment.

The full moon shone down at him through the forest canopy, brightening up the path he walked next to the crawling monster. But what did light help him, when he had no direction and no fuel? Anger was rising in his chest, but he could not muster up enough energy to let it out, or channel it into something useful.

When he spotted a doe, he thought that he might be hallucinating. But then the monster beside him shot forth its threads, which impaled the animal mercilessly from every angle. The skewering made Hidan flinch, though he had never been bothered before by Kakuzu's threads. This time however, it reminded him of the shadow boy's binding shade. The shadow had bound him, and pierced his own flesh, and there had been nothing wonderful about that pain.

The monster retracted its threads from the carrion, and then continued to crawl. Its killing of the doe had been purely by instinct, Hidan guessed. His paralysis from watching the butchery continued until the monster had crawled past the dead doe, and only then did his hunger override any other emotion.

Raw flesh was not his favourite diet, but it was harmless to him, and he knew no techniques to create a fire. Therefore he just threw himself at the carcass without any idea of cooking, and tore off the skin before devouring the hot flesh. His nails, long and hardened from his abolishment under the earth, served him well in clawing it open. It had been a large doe, with plenty of meat, and he was determined to eat it all.

Savagely, Hidan chewed on flesh and bone, ate liver, kidney and heart and nibbled on bone. Frantic with his unbearable hunger, he wanted to leave nothing left. A normal human would have been dead in Hidan's condition, but he alone could experience this sort of extreme hunger. And following hunger was a morbid thirst.

Only the doe's skeleton and most of its skin was left when Hidan was done. He had ripped apart the deer's skin in two and tied it like a towel around his hip before he continued walking, following the monster's trail. It had left him when he ate, but now with renewed energy, finding it was easy. His thirst burned, but it was not as horrible to him as the hunger had been, so he bore with it. The constant level of pain his life underground had consisted of was something he had gotten used to, and even before that, Hidan had always known what it was like to endure suffering.

A stream of water pooled right before them when he caught up with the creature, a sign that maybe Hidan's misfortune and poor luck had finally turned. He crouched down before it and filled his cupped hands with water, which he drank to quench his thirst. At the taste of the cool liquid he vowed to drink the entire stream, and cupped hands of water again and again. Then, when he was satisfied, he started to scrub his body clean. The stream was hardly large enough for him to bathe in, so he was restricted to simply wetting his hands and rubbing off the dirt and blood that way. Careful not to tear up the stitches, something Kakuzu had always nagged to him about, Hidan cleaned himself dutifully in the small stream for as long as it took. With no mirror on his person, he had to rely on his gut feeling that he looked presentable, as he pulled one final hand through his hair to slick it back. It had grown much past his shoulders during the time he had been buried, but finding a barber was not on his priority list.

Then he was left to search for the monster again, but since it crawled it had left an easy trail to follow. By dawn, Hidan had caught up with it once more, right when they reached the outskirts of the Nara forest. A large field of wheat and barley stretched towards the horizon, presenting them with nothing else but grass as far as the eye could see. There was no road through it, but the creature crawled forward as always, and Hidan walked after it with few other options.

By sunrise, Hidan was severely bored with the lack of change in scenery, and the absence of action. His soundless companion especially made him anger.

"Where did you come from, anyway?" he asked the mask. It continued to crawl without acknowledging him, like a deaf dog, but Hidan continued. "You're not any of the masks he carried on his back, I know that. You're not his fire mask, not water, not wind, not lightening… and I know you're not earth, because that was Kakuzu's heart. So what the fuck? What are you supposed to be?"

No answer was given, so Hidan kicked its back. Even that action made no difference to the crawling creature, and Hidan started to wonder if it even belonged to his partner.

"Did Kakuzu keep you secret, huh?" he guessed. "Not that Kakuzu ever opened up to me or nothing, but he did tell me that he had five hearts. And only five." When he was silent, he could hear the steady heartbeats coming from the threaded monster. "So you're his lie, I guess. He kept a sixth heart stored away someplace else. That right?"

The silence from his monster for companion drove Hidan steadily angrier, but there was nothing he could do anything about. For the first few days in his grave, Hidan had screamed and talked endlessly, but then his voice had gone hoarse. With the thirst building, he had been unable to speak, and had been confided to his mind. He much preferred speaking aloud.

"So we're going to find him, right?" he asked. He paused to wait for an answer, though he knew he did not need to. "I am coming with only because you saved me," he explained. "I don't care for that asshole. But a favour for a favour, that's only fair, right?"

Eventually, later that morning, Hidan paused to rest. Ever since he had started to serve God his body had not worked like normal humans, aside from his immortality. He did get tired, hungry and thirsty, but he was often able to function just as well without satisfying those needs, though it pained him to do so. The knowledge that he would not die of starvation meant that he could go hungry for much longer than most people, but even so he preferred to eat, sleep and rest. So he decided to take a break, and he grabbed the creature's threads and kept it still as he slumped to sit on the ground.

The stitching itched, but he knew better than to scratch. What he would not give for a sacrifice, and an hour spent in meditation after the slaughter, at that moment. He missed wearing his pendant, his neck felt much too bare to be without it. If Kakuzu had picked up his pendant instead of his forehead protector after Hidan had been beheaded, then he was sure that he would not have lost against the shadow boy. That was a thought which had circled in Hidan's mind during his entire time spent in the grave. But now it made no difference, for he was free once more, and ready to serve God as he was meant to do.

Teeth sunk into his finger, and he bit off skin from the top of his thumb. The mask's soulless eyes followed his movements as Hidan painted the symbol of Jashin, the symbol of God, on his cleaned and pale chest. After some consideration, he reached over to the creature, and painted the symbol on the white mask as well, where its forehead was. Seeing the circle and triangle made him regain a sense of temporary peace.

With his mind at peace, Hidan lay down on the barley, finding that it tickled no more than the stitches did. He pulled out some of the threads from his companion and held them in a tight grip under his cheek as he rested on his side, to make sure that it would not stray away. What the threads were made of, he had no idea, but they felt like veins as he held them. At least they felt alive.

In the broad day light, Hidan fell asleep, gripping the threads.