The Blood Boutique
IV
So this was Sasuke Uchiha, Sakura thought.
He was paler than he should be, even with the vampirism. Had he taken the blood Shizune had given him? Had he thrown it up? Hidan mentioned the stench of animal blood during their first meeting. Was it possible he was still attempting that lifestyle and slowly dying because of it?
Sakura tapped the paper she had stuck to the door thoughtfully. It had been a long, long time since anyone new had been introduced to Haven. At least, in the sense that it wasn't expected. Genetic vampires had been well documented and more often than not newborns have registered right away, if not expected pregnancies. Turned vampires, on the other hand, had been dwindling in numbers for decades; Hashimara's Doctrine had seen to that ages ago.
So. Either Sasuke had been somehow illegally turned recently (and it would have had to be recently) or he had more going on in his family tree than maybe he realizes. Either way, it was imperative that this meeting goes well since she not only needed him to trust her, but she needed him to trust her enough to conduct an extremely thorough, partially uncomfortable medical exam.
"Hello," she said, throwing up a smile. "I'm Dr. Haruno and I do believe we had an appointment today, Sasuke."
She'd been thinking about it since yesterday, actually, this appointment. He nearly gave the board a collective heart attack since it took him so long to call, especially since Hidan had assured them all he was pretty much burning with questions. They hadn't known what to think when days, then a week had gone by without contact. Some of the grouchier council members had blamed Hidan and his no doubt 'offensive disregard for professionalism' and 'lack of sensitivity'. Personally, she was worried Orion had gotten to him first. It was relieving to see that even if they had he'd still stumbled into the hospital for her.
"Hn," grunted Sasuke.
Right. Not talkative then, or possibly guarded against the other shoe dropping. If he'd been scared enough to avoid them he'd probably been stewing in suspicions, though she hoped that wasn't the case.
She turned to a guilty looking Ino. "Thanks. I'll take it from here." She narrowed her eyes at the prim-looking scrub set the blonde was wearing, detecting no tell-tale bulge where a taser should be.
Of course, Sakura thought. Of course, she wouldn't have it on her. "Talk down Lee for me? He was just about to dance his way to death out there."
"Sure," said Ino, who almost made smoke in her haste to leave. Sakura watched her go, then turned back to her guest.
"Well," she huffed, resolving to chew out her friend later. She'd been trained better than that for sure. "Guess she got nervous. I suppose she's not the only one?"
Sasuke let his head thump to the wall behind him, half trusting the strange girl and missing his switch-blade at the same time. "It's been a day," he murmured quietly. Sakura nodded her head and approached the swivel chair Ino had vacated.
She pumped it up a few paces before sitting down, closing the gap between them. All the normal procedures for averting a vampire crisis had already been taken—blood bag hooked up, oxygen mask, quiet alert page to all the known Haven members working in the hospital—so all there really was to do was explain to Sasuke what was going on.
A daunting task in a room so unsecured, but the paper tag stuck to the door went a long way of assuaging her security needs.
Sasuke studied the woman in front of him with care. She was small and pink and pretty and set something in his gut that felt heavy. Something about her made his hackles go up, and he couldn't get over it. Maybe it was just that she had more knowledge than him and he didn't like the disadvantage. Maybe it was because she looked so innocent—an employee he could see behind a coffee counter, a reception desk, an airport—that it didn't seem possible she could potentially be involved in something so underground. Or, sadly likely, withdrawals were wreaking havoc on his crazed system and making him unnaturally paranoid. The question of whether the trust that paranoia had been splitting his skull for weeks, and he had the discomfiting certainty that he should have made a decision before now. Before a pretty girl smiled at him and acted like blood-sucking humans were totally natural.
Burying the feeling and trying to ignore the smell of his stomach on his shirt, he sat up a little straighter.
"That…that wasn't stage three."
Her eyes snapped to his and it made him swallow. "Shizune. I met her. She said stage three was just…headaches. Toothaches. Tiredness. Not…whatever that was."
Sakura set one of those reassuring smiles his way. "It's normal."
"Normal?"
Sakura raised a hand. "I'm sure there's probably a lot of conflict going on but yes, if it was I think it was, then it was normal. You probably had some intense flashes of light? Your head hurt? Swimming vision?"
"It was…more than that. I could see things that I shouldn't be able to. Not just light, there was light, but it was so much more than just that." Sasuke shook his head at her. "Who are you? What is Haven?"
"Shizune should have—"
"She did! But that doesn't mean you're not lying." Sasuke lowered the respiration mask to snarl at her. "You people, whoever you are, whatever you're doing, you're doing it quietly. Not very reassuring for Shizune's whole 'legal' spiel."
Sakura allowed herself to become displeased with his assessment before she snapped her expression back into something professional. "Right," she sighed. "Information it is."
It wasn't as though Shizune could have said much in the very public, very busy little cafe she'd offered to meet Sasuke in. Only so much could risk exposure, and Haven preferred to ease potential members with an area of high traffic rather than ask them somewhere secure and risk losing them entirely. Sasuke's belligerent, almost impudent accusation could fall under the realm of 'expected', but Sakura admitted that it had insulted her. Partially. (As if she would willingly work someplace seedy. Ch!)
Rolling to the desk at the corner of the room, she snatched a clipboard with some forms on them and a pen, flipping the form around to the blank back. "That," she cocked the pen to the weird piece of paper stuck to the door. "Is a silencing spell."
Sasuke goggled. "A spell. People like me can do magic now?"
"No," Sakura scrawled out his name on the paper. He could see the familiar strokes of the pen that made up his name, the rhythm of it. What she wrote after was lost to him. "But magic users can. I like to explain this entire situation as every fantasy movie you've ever seen, sans some more popular horror themes. The pretense is fairly identical. There are certain members of an," she held up quotation marks in her pen hand before writing again. "Underground society that lives alongside the daily life we're used to seeing. Vampire, werewolf, witch, and warlock."
"You're shitting me."
"No."
"…how many are there?"
She smiled up at him. "Just the ones I listed. To my knowledge at least."
Sasuke was half-sure that this was still all a kind of smokescreen to hide an ulterior motive, but once again a feeling of unsettling tucked itself close to his gut. Sakura was a smiling again and he was suddenly sure that it was something about that smile that disturbed him. Sasuke found himself studying it with intensity; was it the way the corners of her lips didn't quite move? Or was it the way her lids shielded her expression enough to wax it into something so practiced?
Picking apart the details did little to dampen the overall effect, and Sasuke leaned forward into that smile to hide how he wanted to shrink away.
"To your knowledge?"
Sakura shrugged. "I've been alive for a little bit now—it seems that there's always something I don't know."
"But anyways!" She continued, finally turning the paper over for him to see. For Sasuke: was written in bold capital letters, and beneath it were four diagrams of a sort. The geometric half shapes were odd to look at, but she drew them with purpose. "See? Vampire, werewolf, witch, and warlock." She tapped each incomplete shape in turn, and Sasuke was struck by the realization that they were not so many shapes as they were glyphs.
"We've all used these symbols for centuries as a means to communicate. Nothing too complicated, mind you. Just like a loose territory marker, or a hidden sign."
"Why?" Sasuke wanted to know.
"Courtesy," Sakura flashed a bit of tooth in his direction, and somehow it seemed more genuine. "It's…It's almost like a form of manners. If a vampire wanders into werewolf territory, we're obligated to help maintain their disguise, or alternately, to avoid become conspicuous ourselves."
She twirled her pen. "There's no xenophobic war if that's what you're thinking."
Sasuke replaced the respirator to hide how incredulous he was feeling. This wasn't on his agenda today, hell, not even his lifetime. First, it was the fact that he was turning into a vampire, which he couldn't exactly ignore, and now there was this pink doctor telling him that there weren't just vampires?
Fuck it. He was just going to roll with it, but there were some questions that needed to be answered.
"Hold on," he set the respirator down to the side and looked at this strange woman as seriously as he could. "Shizune said this was legal. How is that possible? We kill people."
Sakura frowned. "If someone had to die every time a blood transplant occurred, it wouldn't be very popular. Keep in mind that most of the vampire knowledge you've been exposed to is a fictional version meant to create suspense. You need blood, yes, and you did develop the facilities to do that, but as long as the blood gets in, no drinking needs to actually happen."
"So yes, it's legal." She switched the way her legs were crossed. "Blood donations happen all the time, and we've got a designation on where some of that goes."
"And…the hospital just lets this happen? These disappearing blood donations?" He squinted suspiciously down at her. "Hospitals are huge and keep track of things like this. Someone higher up knows."
A bland smile was the only facial tell he received. "The chief of this hospital absolutely knows about where a minute section of donations go—please understand that our population really is quite small—but as for anything larger? Like government or politics? We slip under the radar."
"Really?" Sasuke didn't believe that for a second.
"Really, really," she said, politely ignoring his scorn. "Minorites tend to do that, and honestly big organizations focus on big problems. Like employment and crime rate."
They stared at each other a moment, and at that moment Sakura could read all the worries behind his changing eyes. He was scared and unsure of his footing, and all that she could do was offer him more information.
Her lips pinched. She didn't like talking about these things in an unsecured room. Too many bad things had happened in the past. She wanted to get him downstairs, to the below ground levels were she could do a proper medical examination and explain things freely under the safety of thousands of networking spells. The paper tag on the door merely muffled sound—both ways—instead of creating a metaphysical barrier like the wards did in the basement.
But how to get a twitchy, nervous fledgling vampire out from where he felt he had the element of control and into a place where he actually did yet didn't trust it?
Sasuke saw her impatience and wondered what it meant. What? Did she have somewhere more important to be? Some other supernatural crisis that needed to be averted. She was trussed up like a doctor—did that mean that she was one, but just for the weird ones? Or was it just a front?
Should he trust what she was saying, though? Statistically speaking there was a fifty/fifty chance of her being completely honest since vampires had to function somehow, and the idea that it was totally evil and chaotic just didn't seem right. The spark of logic, of reason, was blessedly simple to his overwrought nerves...
But. The alternative was terrifying.
In some kind of cede of power, Sakura broke the silent two-way study by uncrossing her legs and holding out her hands, turning her expression into them. "Haven is not really a secret organization," she said slowly. "If you put our name into a search engine what's going to pop up is a funded research team that specializes in stem cell technology. And that's completely true. I work with embryonic stem cell donations as a day job."
Sasuke narrowed his eyes at her.
"It's just that it's not all we do. It's not quite a front, but it is a way we explain a few of our preoccupations."
"Like blood donations," Sasuke hazarded.
"Exactly. It works out on paper, we have access to specialized equipment and our own labs. Chronologically speaking Haven was an established route for supernatural aid before it was a company, but it did more than just adopt a scientific hobby. Haven is a stem cell research organization just as equally as it is a protection service."
She looked up at him, and he was seized by the earnestness in her sea glass eyes. "Really. We're established and modern. I've got a neat powerpoint I want to show you that has our entire organizational chart and chain of command. You're going to meet pretty much everyone in our region at some point."
Did she make her eyes glow like that on command, he wondered, paralyzed by the feeling she was pouring into her words. He felt somehow the villain for doubting her still, but he couldn't help the red flags her brief explanation raised.
"Protection?" He looked away from her, to the blood bag that was near drained next to him. Thankfully, the sight did little more than elicit a grimace. "Protection from what?
Sakura made a face like she'd just bitten into an onion. "Unfortunately, I can't discuss that here. That silencing spell is rather weak to the ones we have downstairs, and that information is very sensitive."
"So something is out to get us." Sasuke tensed where he sat, staring into her like he could peel away her secrets by sight alone. She felt burned by his gaze, surprised by his focus under such circumstances, but, she actually lived with the behemoth Kakuzu and if she could survive his eyes then she could survive just about anything.
She met that challenging gaze head-on, reigning in the beginnings of her temper. Impatience wasn't something she handled gracefully, even after all this damn time on planet Earth. Breathing in, she idly drummed her fingers on her clipboard and considered her next strategy.
"Okay, how about this. I had a plan for today that I think will get us both what we want. What I want is to get a thorough examination of your progress so we both have a better idea of what to expect, and to hopefully begin the registration process into Haven. What you want is more information so you can feel safe, yes?"
Sasuke opened his mouth to…to what? Deny it? No, that's exactly what he wanted but he didn't like how it made him seem weak.
The doctor's expression was somewhat placating, but it couldn't erase the irritation he'd seen before. "Will you trust me enough to examine you? Please? Absolutely no harm will come to you in this hospital."
His eyes swept her appearance, looking for things that set his nerves raw, but he found nothing. Nothing, besides the niggling discomfort he couldn't quite name. What was it? It couldn't be just the way she smiled or the way she sat. Why did he feel like there was something obvious he should be seeing?
When he couldn't figure it out after the first couple of seconds, Sasuke begrudgingly agreed. No true alarm bells were ringing in his head, and from what Ino had impressed on him it was in everyone's benefits to cater to his needs.
So she smiled again and led him out of the room, allowing him his nervous ticks of recovering his dark glasses and fixing his hair patiently.
He was surprised that the little paper tag didn't do anything phenomenal when it was removed; she yanked it down like taking a sticky note off the wall. He felt no difference when he left the room, no weird shift in atmosphere, but the noise was noticeable.
A few stares followed them down the hall, but Sakura's bright chatter all but drowned them out.
She talked about almost nothing at all, this strange doctor, but soon enough she'd swept them both into an empty elevator and pulled a ring of keys from a pocket. A button lighted up when she turned the key, and he was struck again with the wary idea of a mad scientists lab.
"Don't worry," she said, looking up at him. She was quite short. "It's just a security measure to make sure no one accidentally wanders in. There really isn't anything impressive on this level besides a few labs."
He looked to the buttons that marched below the lighted one and asked where the others went.
"Well, the lowest one is just machinery. Only the janitors have keys to that one, I think." She frowned, thinking. Sasuke was just surprised it was something so mundane. "Something about a powerbox, as well. Maybe our emergency power? I don't know for sure, but this level's another set of labs and the morgue."
"You need two floors for that? The labs."
"More than that," she turned her head heavenwards, tone dry. "Tsunade, our chief of staff, has been trying to push for more funding for a whole new wing, but it's been slow progress."
Sasuke wasn't sure what to think about the small-talk she'd been spouting. He was both grateful and put off by the light-hearted take to his own personal crisis, but it was in that elevator that a thought struck him.
"Are you a vampire?" he spat out, almost ashamed he hadn't thought to ask sooner.
Again, the smile she sent him made his heart pound. "Half of one, yes, on my mother's side."
He gaped at her. "Half? Is that—I mean. We can…with humans?"
"With people." She corrected him as the elevators opened with a musical chime. "Vampirism is more of a genetic quirk than it is a different species, almost like a mutation chain. You're still human no matter what, and before you ask, we haven't documented any similar cases in animals. Kind of a mystery how it all began honestly, but I wouldn't mind explaining what I know. Just so you're aware I will be giving you a kind of Q and A for the basics."
The hallways in this new floor were narrower and darker, but that was soon remedied by the motion sensing lights that flicked to life as they passed under them. The hallway was occasionally interrupted by frosted glass doors, all accompanied by some kind of security pad.
Sakura stopped by a locked door, swiped her card, and gestured him in with a smile. "This is the main lab that we use for examina—Hidan!"
It was almost comical how a man of his stature could flinch. Sasuke caught a low 'fucking hell, woman' before the white-haired man stood from a chair and turned.
Sasuke flinched.
"Hidan! What-? Goddammit, I've told you not to eat in here."
"Calm your tits," Hidan pulled his shirt sleeve down and wiped his mouth on the inside of his wrist, dragging a long, long smear of red down it. "I'm just dropping in for a second."
"That doesn't matter," Sakura hissed, glaring at him and tossing her clipboard on a low table. "We have the house for this kind of stuff, for heaven's sake this is my lab!"
More than that, Sakura thought acidly, I'm trying to make someone feel safe.
Hidan rolled his eyes. Sasuke found himself slightly disconcerted to be on the receiving end of an almost companionable stare. Hidan seemed to be having a bro moment with him as if saying 'chicks, ammiright?' before going back to cleaning up.
"And besides that," Sakura spared a scathing look towards the blood bag he'd messily torn into. "You're not even supposed to be here right now. I told you at noon!"
"Feelings," Hidan dismissed casually.
Sasuke watched the bizarre way he vaguely gestured towards the ceiling, as if it meant something, with trepidation. What the hell was he getting into? He hadn't liked Hidan from the get-go, and even less now since it seemed he had a preference for drinking blood straight.
Sakura fumed. She'd asked Hidan to come as a precaution like Shizune had asked but he knew better than to eat in here. For obvious reasons, it wasn't an ideal place. Sakura tossed a pleading, anxious look towards Sasuke and hoped he wasn't making plans to drive to the border tonight.
"'sides," Hidan said, pulling up the bottom of his shirt to wipe the remaining blood off his lips and chin. "I needed to worship."
"…worship."
Hidan looked up and met a wintry stare. He wrinkled his face at her. "Hell, babe, it's not like I didn't clean up."
Struggling against the instinct to quite seriously break something of his, as had been her favored coping mechanism for decades, Sakura wrestled with a tight smile. "Thank you for cleaning up. Please stop eating in the lab. I've told you that you might mess with our samples, and really, it's rude to whoever stops by."
Feeling that her statement was rather pointed, she refrained from tossing her head towards Sasuke for emphasis. God, he must really think they were all psychopaths. She'd been trying so hard to get him to relax, too. All patient and chatty and hoping he wouldn't find her or her job scary.
Hidan only shrugged, and it struck her as totally flippant to her life's work. "It's easier to clean in here."
He picked up a black sweater and worked his way into it. "And I already told you I was getting feedback. Man in charge kept fucking with me."
Sakura allowed a spark of concern to edge into her expression, but Hidan didn't look troubled by it so she allowed it to slip away. Exasperated, she turned towards Sasuke. "I know you've already met Hidan, but just in case he was his usual self and didn't actually introduce himself…"
"We're guys," Hidan bent his head under a lab sink and washed out his mouth. Spitting into the drain, he glared up at the doctor. "And I was hungry and skinny over there had just killed something. We weren't gonna sit and make friendship bracelets."
"…this is Hidan." Sakura twitched in a narrowly avoided attempt to smack the back of his head while he was bent over like he was. It would be so easy to push his head under the faucet, too. Make a good impression, she reminded herself sternly. Maintaining her professionality wasn't going as smoothly as she would have liked, and honestly, there was little she could do to make Hidan less threatening.
Sasuke watched the byplay with concealed bemusement. More and more he was getting the idea that his doctor wasn't someone who kept level temper well, and beyond that weird personality quirk, he was obvious that she was concerned with how this looked. The courtesy was oddly comforting.
"We've met," said Sasuke. Feeling odd at the double stare he was getting from both a pretty half vampire (he was still getting used to that) and a man who had blood messily smeared under his sweatshirt, he steeled himself and tried for nonchalance. "We exchanged names over the phone."
Some of his old self, his old pretention, and arrogance came back to him suddenly. A prideful coping mechanism or just a complex, he slithered into old skin easily and before he knew it he was cocking an eyebrow, shoving his thumbs into the shallow pockets of his jeans, and saying "Honestly I've seen worse."
"Oh, go fuck yourself, pretty boy."
"Hidan!"
"Whatever. You got nothing to worry about from him so I'm leaving." Hidan smoothed back his hair with wet fingers.
Sasuke watched him go with sudden disdain. Crass, classless hooligan, he thought caustically. The sudden self-importance made him stand up straighter, preen for a moment in his own stature and pride, but wilted almost immediately when he realized he was probably worse. His pride was brittle and supported by sand at this point—who was he to think he was any better, a mopey little dramatic druggy who had routinely spent hours of his time with the gutters of society.
Regardless, once the door closed with a secure sounding click Sakura decided that she was just going to barrel on forwards. Sasuke hadn't run screaming yet.
She cringed. "It's…usually a lot smoother of an introduction than this."
Sasuke scratched at the edge of an eyebrow, cowed by his own mental struggle. "Just keep going."
He didn't bother to mention that the shock of the past few hours had desensitized him, or that he'd probably have one last panic attack before he went to bed that night. For now, he was floating comfortably in a place between surprise and complete expectation of odd and unusual sights.
Nodding her head briskly, Sakura summoned some of her abandoned cheer and picked up her clipboard. "It's just through here. Most of this stuff functions for the stem research I'm doing, but we've got more specialized equipment back here."
She led him to a side door that for all the world looked like a supply closet. With absolutely no flourish at all, she opened it to reveal just that. Dusty shelves contained more boxes of plastic gloves than he thought necessary, walls were crammed with mops, brooms with their dustpans, and an odd mishmash of strange plastic lab equipment that did gods knew what.
Alarmingly, he'd snuck closer to Sakura than he'd even realized. She turned to look up at him, an almost mischievous edge to her features before they both leaned away in mutual surprise.
"Sorry."
"No! No, that's okay. I…" she cleared her throat and gestured emphatically towards the closet. "I was going to show you something cool."
Staring unseeingly at the space for a second she visibly recollected herself and shut the door with her foot. Before he could make any quick judgments about her definition of cool—he had just been introduced to the presence of fantastical entities—she made a few shadow puppets with her hands in quick succession and reached for the door again.
It wasn't a supply closet anymore.
Sasuke caught his breath at the sight of a gleaming tiled floor. The new hallway was short, turning off into a space that seemed like it should have been into the other hospital hallway outside the lab, but was not. Before he could really twist is mind around the subversion of physics, Sakura was taking bold steps forward.
"I know it might seem somewhat alarming, but it really is just a small sleight—oh, and expect a tiny jolt coming through the door."
Sasuke jumped as what felt like a static shock zapped him. He looked back and saw nothing, rubbing at the nape of his hairline to smooth the baby hairs there.
"It's those wards I mentioned before," Sakura explained, gently prompting him forward with an inviting tilt to her head. "Most people only see the closet, but if they make it past that illusion this is our backup."
"What does it do?" Sasuke picked up his pace to walk even with the doctor. The hallway wasn't small, but it was just narrow enough this his bicep made the occasional bump against her shoulder.
Sakura hummed. "A difficult concept to explain but I'll do my best. Essentially the wards are something of a conscious. Not complicated at all, but smart enough to detect ill intent or generally people who shouldn't be here. It takes defensive precautions if it feels the need."
Still feeling the static shock in his fingertips, Sasuke wondered if 'defensive precautions' included electrocuting people.
"And it felt that I wasn't a threat? Just like that?"
Sakura beamed at him. "I didn't think you meant to hurt me either."
She walked on in the sudden silence that tied Sasuke's tongue in knots, opening yet another door to yet another room. Beyond it gave Sasuke more to think about than whether or not Sakura's comment made him more or less of a man.
Equipment. So much of it.
"Well!" Sakura tossed the clipboard away and gestured to the nearest…contraption. "Since we've been speculating up until this point about close to everything about you, let's run a few tests. We'll be checking your eyes since you mentioned they were different, and while we do all this feel free to ask me any and all questions, okay?"
Numbly, he nodded and stepped forward into the impossible, invisible room.
Hidan closed the lab door behind him and wondered what the point of immortality and psychic intuition was if he couldn't use it, goddamn. Rolling his eyes heavenwards he pulled his sweatshirt low and began making his way to the exit. He'd been pissy when Sakura had asked him to come along, if only because he knew that she knew that she was only asking as a polite courtesy. Crazy girl nearly put him out of commission—not much else was going to challenge her.
But. Big man kept talking to him. The visions weren't especially clear; so much of his past power had been lost when he dialed down the psychopath. What he did see was the figure of a man. Not quite a silhouette and not quite an image, but enough alarm was attached to the vague impression to make it pressing.
He felt he needed to get to the hospital. Then, he felt he needed to get to the lab. After that the feeling ebbed, only leaving him with the certainty that the issue was going to come to him. He knew the kid wasn't the issue, at least not on his own, but he might've brought something with him. A camera, a voice recorder, something that attached him with another person pulling the strings, but when the little shit walked in any and all speculations went out the window.
Sasuke Uchiha wasn't a threat. A huge, complicated problem, yes (the sheer amount of 'trouble' that had radiated off of him had tripled since Hidan last saw him at the diner), but an actual threat that meant actual harm? No.
Which meant that loitering in the freakishly sterile area with a snack had been a complete waste of time.
Grumpy, Hidan decided that he was going to just go home. He'd double checked the maintenance on the wards while he was in the lab so he didn't worry about a break in. It was just Sakura and pretty boy in there and he wasn't feeling up to haunting the halls of a hospital. There was always too much feeling happening. The walls were soaked with it, and the ghosts got irritating after a while.
The buzzing sensation of danger had all but disappeared as he walked further and further, and when the elevator doors opened to take him to ground level they dropped even lower.
There was a slight, unassuming doctor occupying the space inside and he moved over with a bland smile. "Going up?"
Hidan walked in, eyeing the white-haired man strangely. "Weren't you?"
Unless either of them looked like janitors or mechanics, there wasn't any reason to go down.
…Actually, since he had to wait for the elevator, and the man didn't get off on Hidan's floor, did that mean he was going down?
He was treated to a sincerer smile than before and almost immediately Hidan felt most of his paranoia and anxiety drift away. It actually took him a second to detect the sheer, spider-silk spell that hovered like a breathable cloud around the…witch? Warlock? If he himself hadn't sworn oaths he might not have detected the sophisticated deception, but as it was even he felt blinded. Like his vision had fogged; a sixth sense dimmed.
Unamused at the reminder of how far he had fallen from previous power, he almost ignored the quiet reply to his question:
"Oh, I'm going up," said the man, reaching to pop a headphone into his ear. "Corpses don't make good company."
A/N: Behold, a semi-presentable update in a semi-timely manner. Review if you have the time—I'd appreciate it!
