Chapter 3
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
- Wordsworth
The next week, Ino goes to the farmer's house for dinner. They eat the killed chicken (praise be) and the potatoes, all organic and homegrown and delicious. Then he walks her around his property in the long summer evening, and shows her his orchards and his green fields and his rolling hills of wheat dancing endlessly into the horizon, and she knows he's telling her that, if she sticks around and lets him court her, it could all be hers too.
At sundown, they walk around the pond and Sonkei shows Ino the corner with the waterlilies, their petals all curled up now that night-time is imminent. It is a beautiful, tranquil scene – mauves and whites intermingle with the evening's long shadows and night creatures begin their clicking, croaking chorus.
Ino tells farmer-boy to wait as she weaves her way gracefully through some cattails, intent on picking a waterlily for him. Killing a waterlily, that is – praise Jashin, ha, ha.
The instant the god's name flits though her mind, something like a pressure, or like a will beyond her own, causes her to look down. She catches sight of a pale shape in the dark water at her feet. Something that was definitely not there a moment before, unless she really is blind.
Something that looks rather a lot like a human limb.
Ino keeps her face sweetly neutral and plucks the waterlily that she had been eyeing. She hands it, still dripping, to the farmer, with a kiss, and tells him to take good care of it. He says some things to her, words of attachment, and she nods and smiles, and they walk back to the village arm in arm along a romantic country lane, and Ino remembers absolutely nothing of the conversation.
Farmer-boy drops Ino off in front of the closed-up flower shop and leaves after kissing her goodnight warmly. Ino's head is a thousand miles away – well, no, more like five miles, back at the pond on his property where a dismembered leg awaits her – but she does her best to kiss him back and seem normal, like this is just the end of a lovely evening and not the beginning of a weird night.
Ino slips into the flower shop as she usually would to make her way up to her apartment, but instead of going up the stairs, she stands at the window and watches Sonkei disappear. She gives him a fifteen minute head start before she exits the shop and follows. But this time, she does not walk like a civilian girl through the quaint streets of Kurashiki; she flies like a kunoichi from shadow to shadow until the edge of the village, and then she cuts across fields instead of taking the romantic country lane to Sonkei's farm.
She creeps back onto his property and makes nice with the farm dogs who recognize her with vigorous tail wags, and she fishes the limb out of the pond and carries it home, wrapped in her jacket.
VVV
"Finally, you're home," says Hidan's whiny voice as he hears the front door open. "You ditch me so often, I'm starting to think you don't like me."
"I don't," says Ino, snapping the door shut behind her. "So I don't really know why I keep bringing home more of you."
Ino lays her jacket on the sofa and flips it open to reveal a human leg, sliced just above the knee, and laced with the long fronds of a single waterlily.
"Yours?" asks Ino, but she already knows it is, because she was led to it when she thought his god's name in a kind of joke invocation, and it's the second time that that's happened, and this whole thing is kind of starting to creep her out.
"My leg!" squeals Hidan. "You know, I fuckin' prayed that Jashin would guide you, because I think he forgot about you for a while, so you fell into fornication and sin and shit…"
Ino places him on his usual observation post on the toilet lid as she gives the leg a thorough wash.
Hidan observes her every movement with a kind of rapture.
"Stop looking at me like that," says Ino brusquely, when his worshipful gaze becomes too much.
"How can I not," says Hidan, eyes aglow with fervor. "You're amazing, angel-bitch. This is just more proof that you're the one, you've been sent to help me by Jashin himself. How the fuck else are my body parts materializing around you?"
"They were all caught in the same current and ended up in the waterways around here," says Ino. "Obviously. It's coincidence. And you're a fanatic, so you make everything fit your stupid beliefs."
"I understand," says Hidan with a beatific look. "You can't really acknowledge your true nature in this place… this world of sin. But I know. You know. We know. You're an agent of Jashin, sent to piece together my worldly body, so that I can continue to do his work…"
He rambles on about destiny and Jashin's hands and divine interventions and Ino's holiness and how blessed he is, and and and…
And he doesn't even know the half of it, and Ino will never, ever tell him. Because, twice now, she has found bits of him after a half-assed mock-prayer, and, twice now, those prayers were answered, immediately and decisively.
These were coincidences, and she's being silly. Just flukes.
Ino doesn't think too hard about how a limb of the size of the leg she is currently scrubbing could possibly have ended up in that isolated pond on Sonkei's property with no connection to a river and no current whatsoever. Maybe an animal dragged it in. Or there was a huge rainstorm and a nearby stream flooded into the pond and carried the leg in too. Or perhaps the pond is fed by a secret underground river.
See? There are all sorts of rational explanations.
Ino dries off the leg and, since she also has his arm, she makes a Box of Hidan out of a storage bin and puts his body parts in there.
Then she makes for the kitchen and pours herself a glass of white wine. Hidan disapproves and lectures her, because drink is sinful. Ino informs him that she needs some liquid fortification, because it's been a strange night, so he can shove his opinion up his ass, except, oh wait, he doesn't have one.
To her mild surprise, he snickers and calls her a funny little wino-bitch instead of moralizing further. Ino ferries him to the sofa and perches him on the armrest, places the box on the floor, and curls up next to Hidan with her wineglass in one hand and a little pile of cheese squares in the other, which help make everything better.
Hidan looks upon the small collection of limbs in the Box of Hidan with great fondness, and snuggles his face into Ino's armpit, and tells her thank you, he is so fucking blessed to have her, seriously, and can she convey his soul-felt gratitude to Jashin…
"So how many parts were you cut into, exactly?" asks Ino as she contemplates the box's gruesome contents.
"Damn, good question," says Hidan. "Lemme try to remember how it went… he cut off my arms first, the fucker, so I was completely useless… then my leg, so I'd fall over, which I did, and then my head, because he wanted me to shut up. Hah – like that would've worked. Dumbass…"
"And then," says Hidan, looking at the ceiling very serenely, in Ino's opinion, for someone reminiscing about his hideous dismemberment, "I think my body and right leg should still be in one piece, unless they got torn up going over the falls… that motherfucker had a mean throw."
"Two arms, a head, a leg, and possibly a torso and leg in one piece," counts Ino on her fingers. She looks up at Hidan, quite unimpressed. "That seems like a long list of parts."
"Come on, sugar-tits, we're already at three out of five, here," says Hidan. "Cheer up."
"I guess," says Ino, reaching down to poke one of Hidan's toes in morbid fascination. "What did you do to piss the guy off so much?"
"I was doing him the huge honour of trying to sacrifice him to Jashin, actually," says Hidan. "He took it the wrong way for some reason."
"You tried to kill him and he got mad?" says Ino. "Weird."
"I know, right?" says Hidan. "Thank you. No-one gets me like you do."
Ino keeps her face neutral in the face of his obliviousness.
"I kind of missed the part where he was a swordplay genius, when I met him," continues Hidan. "Some katana freak. I should never have tried. I couldn't even get blood off him, he was so fast. Hindsight's always fuckin' twenty-twenty."
He turns to Ino with a small glow of devotion in his eyes. "But hey, angel-bitch, if it hadn't happened, I wouldn't have met you, and you're, like, Jashin's godly hand on earth, so it was all worth it in the end. Seriously."
Ino doesn't meet his eyes. She would really like to think that she is not Jashin's godly hand on earth, because he is the fantastic creation of a mad monk's mind, but sheer dumb luck has led her to that monk's lost body parts twice. Three times, if you count his head.
She can understand why, to Hidan, it could seem convincing. Less impressive feats have been labelled miracles by people of far less faith.
Ino looks out of the big bay windows, but it is pitch black outside, and all she can see is her pensive reflection on the couch, and, a little to her left, Hidan perched on the armrest, contemplating her with quiet devotion, like she's some kind of a saint.
Seeking distraction from his uncomfortably reverent gaze, Ino undoes her high ponytail and loosens her hair between her fingers with a sigh.
Hidan watches her. She sees his nose twitch as the smell of her shampoo wafts towards him. She doesn't bother to tell him that the main floral notes reaching his nose are (god damn it) waterlilies. It's a random coincidence; she bought this shampoo before coming here for the summer. And it's information that she would rather keep to herself, because he will make something of the fact, it will just be added to his ever-growing list of so-called evidence, and… just, no.
He sniffs loudly. "Smells good. What's in your shampoo, flower-girl?"
"Jasmine," lies Ino, because it's not like he'll be able to tell – he's a guy, for god's sake.
"Huh," says Hidan. "I guess jasmine smells different where I come from."
Oops. Ino leaps at the opportunity to change the subject. "Where do you come from, anyway?"
"Yugakure."
"Never heard of it," says Ino.
"It was a ninja village, once," says Hidan. "Then some pansy-ass peace-loving hippies took over. And they made it a civilian town. A resort town. 'Cuz it has hot springs everywhere."
"Oh?"
"Yeah," says Hidan. His features harden; it seems that this is still a sore spot for him. "And I wanted to be a shinobi, not a pool boy. So I killed a bunch of people and I left."
Ino tilts her head at him. "A shinobi? You?"
"Yeah."
"Really. Do you pretty people to death, too?" asks Ino with a smirk.
Hidan looks unimpressed by Ino's assessment of his looks. "Fuck off. I'm ruggedly handsome."
"Eh," says Ino, her eyes traveling slowly from his refined features to his startling eyes to his too-soft, too-pretty hair. "Debateable. Besides, I thought you were a priest."
"These things aren't mutually exclusive," says Hidan. "Slaughter is my faith. And assassinations and shit are my job. It works."
"Too bad," says Ino. "You would've made a great pool boy."
Hidan narrows his eyes at her. "I'm a priest of Jashin, bitch-tits."
"Yes, I know, but I can see you as a pool boy," says Ino, contemplating him over the rim of her wineglass and hiding his missing body from her view with her hand. "Yeah. Prancing around in a tight swimsuit for the enjoyment of the ladies…"
He glares. Ino can see that her teasing is just on the verge of vexing him for real, so she drops it. "So you're a shinobi without a shinobi village. Are you a mercenary nin, now, or…?"
"Something like that," says Hidan. "I just joined this group that specializes in kidnapping demon vessels. Then I got side-tracked by katana-boy. I should probably send them an explanation, or something…"
"Probably," says Ino. "Or they won't retain you for long."
"Meh," says Hidan, and Ino imagines that he would be shrugging, if he had any shoulders. "Not my top priority. Jashin will guide me to where I'm supposed to be."
Ino turns away and stares somberly at her reflection.
"Like here," says Hidan. "With you."
Ino busies herself with running her fingers through her hair and is silent.
Hidan sighs. "You'll find the rest of me soon. And I can go on fucking up everyone's shit and making Jashin happy."
Ino idly makes a braid and does not answer.
"Did you fuck him tonight?" asks Hidan suddenly. "Farmer Jizz?"
Ino twitches an eyebrow, because the question has zero relevance to their conversation. But, nevertheless. "Yeah."
He looks like he's about to give her a scolding, so she presses her fingertips to his mouth. "Shh. Twice, actually. And then we walked around his property, and that's when I found your leg, so maybe there is something in those little deaths that Jashin approves of…"
She leaves him to chew on that as she makes her way to the bedroom.
"I should have read the god damn scriptures," broods Hidan.
VVV
