"It's quiet. Too quiet." That line had to have been one of the most overused movie clichés that Kakuzu had ever had the misfortune of hearing. People coming into the bank in the middle of a weekday would always say it with a smile on their face, as though certain that Kakuzu had never heard this oh so clever line before. Movies and TV shows seemed to quote this whenever Kakuzu had the audacity to leave his streaming service on one program for more than a minute; sometimes he would even hear this phrase in his dreams. Perhaps because this line was so overused the banker had never been able to fully appreciate it, but now that Hidan was gone it took on a whole new meaning.

His apartment, which should have been considered blissfully quiet, was now as uncomfortably silent as a graveyard.

Living with a person for two years will form some habits, or at the very least familiar circumstances that one unconsciously expects to encounter each day. Although he'd continued to set his alarm, Kakuzu hadn't needed to wait for the thing to go off in the past several months because Hidan was always up before him and indirectly woke the banker each morning when he swore at the toaster for burning his breakfast or cursed himself for drinking his daily cup of coffee before it had time to cool. Then there would be more cursing later when they tried to make something for dinner (which more often than not ended in the pair of them calling it quits and just tossing everything in the slow cooker for dinner the next day while they ordered out), jabs made at the expense of Kakuzu's customers when the banker talked about his day, and defending himself when speaking about the dramas of his school day. Even when they were merely relaxing in the living room after a hard day's work or enjoying their day off, Hidan was usually babbling about something if he wasn't completely absorbed in his books. There was always noise in the apartment when Hidan had been living with him.

Now that the Jashinist was gone, things were so quiet that Kakuzu could swear he heard the clock on the oven ticking. And that was a digital clock.

Sighing, the banker stirred his coffee for the millionth time before he finally got around to taking a sip. Bah, still too weak. Hidan's coffee making skills left something to be desired (more than once a mug of the steaming beverage had left Kakuzu doubled over and coughing), but they always woke you up and were never short on flavor. Compared to that, Kakuzu's brew tasted like watered-down instant coffee powder.

But as much as Kakuzu might dislike this new arrangement of silent apartments and poorly brewed coffee, this was to be the new normal for him. With any luck, Marin might relent and allow Hidan to overnight with him now and again in the distant future, but that still meant Hidan's coffee and banter would be an occasional treat.

Frowning at the prospect, Kakuzu poured another scoop of ground coffee beans into the pot (hopefully this batch would turn out stronger) and went into the living room to turn on the TV. At least the background noise of a TV show would break the silence.

-several days later-

You could call Marin a lot of things, but a liar wasn't one of them. True to her word the bartender had set up a dinner for Kakuzu, Hidan, and herself on Friday evening of that week. Hidan tried to contain his excitement and act like this wasn't an incredibly big deal, which worked about as well as trying to get a ballerina to binge eat at a buffet.

"Calm down Hidan," Marin scolded late Friday afternoon. "You're going to leave marks on the walls if you keep bouncing off of them like that."

"I'm not bouncing off the walls, damn it!" Hidan argued, but any anger he might have had in his voice was overshadowed by an eagerness to see his friend.

A knock on the door came just a bit later, and Hidan all but sprinted down the entryway to open the door. To no one's surprise Kakuzu was standing on the other side in his work clothes; he must have gone straight from the bank to Marin's apartment.

At this point, Hidan was momentarily unsure of what to do next. He wanted to pounce on Kakuzu and hug him tightly, but they'd never done something like that even when the pair of them were living together. However, being casual and just showing the banker into the apartment didn't seem like a great idea either; what if Kakuzu got the wrong impression and thought that Hidan hadn't really missed him all that much?

As the Jashinist was desperately trying to figure out what the best course of action might be, Kakuzu took matters into his own hands and ruffled Hidan's hair with a smirk. "Gah, Jashin-damnit, cut it out! What the hell is it with you people and messing up my hair?!"

"Good to hear you screeching," Kakuzu commented as he stepped inside and shut the door behind him. "You were so quiet that I was beginning to worry you'd seen the error of your ways and decided to become a polite model citizen."

"You're the one who made me be a Jashin-damned polite model citizen so I could go back to school, dumbass!"

"And yet you were silent as a church mouse a moment ago, while we are clearly not in school," Kakuzu countered, smirking as he teased the younger man.

"Fuck you with something big, thorny, and covered in sandpaper!"

"Hidan, if you're yelling at the security guard again-" Marin rounded the corner then and stopped speaking when she saw who had come in. "Ah, Kakuzu, glad you made it. The directions were sufficient?"

"Yes ma'am, thanks again for sending them to me." Hey, laying it on a little heavy with the manners couldn't hurt too much, right? This night was going to determine whether he could see Hidan in the future from outside a jail cell, after all.

"Good." Marin then stepped forward and cuffed her son on the back of his head, making the teenager cry out. "I don't care if it's just Kakuzu, you will not greet guests in my home with that kind of language!"

"But mom, the dumbass is used to it," Hidan whined.

"He's subjected me to much worse in the morning before he's had his coffee," Kakuzu promised, wondering for the first time if perhaps he should have been a little more active in trying to curb Hidan's swearing habits.

Marin's eyes narrowed at this bit of information. "Oh really." Hidan was suddenly trapped in one of Marin's famous headlocks and receiving the noogie of his life. "You little brat, I raised you better than that!"

"Not the hair, Jashin-damnit, not the hair!"

Marin finally relented and allowed her son to escape to the far side of the entryway by Kakuzu, shaking her head at the teenager. "I swear you're the vainest little son a mother could ask for." At this she waved her hand dismissively and motioned for the two of them to follow after her. "Dinner should be ready in a minute, boys; I just need to pop the rolls into the oven to warm them up first."

"Come on, I'll show you around," Hidan said, walking deeper into their home with Kakuzu in tow.

The apartment was a decent size for a two bedroom, one bathroom setup, but the tour still didn't take long. Kakuzu noted that this place had a bigger kitchen than his own (allowing for a table people could comfortably sit at instead of having to squish it into the corner), but everything else seemed to have about the same dimensions as their old place. Hidan's room had already had time to get messy, and Fritters was slumbering peacefully in his cage while Hidan showed the banker around. Once the tour was over, Hidan and Kakuzu took a seat on the couch to chat a bit while Marin finished making dinner. "How are things with Deidara?" Kakuzu asked.

Hidan frowned and ran his fingers through his hair, trying to come up with a sufficient answer. "He was fine with breaking up, so I guess that's a good thing, right? But now…I dunno, shit's been kind of weird between us for the past couple days. I mean, fuck, I knew things would be off for a while, but there's no one else around us to make this feel any less fucking awkward than it does right now!"

"Maybe you could join a club or something?" Kakuzu suggested. "You know, just to give the two of you some space for a while."

Hidan gave the banker an incredulous look. "Join a club. At the end of April. When school lets out in three weeks."

"It doesn't have to be something at school," Kakuzu reasoned. "You could join a sports team-"

"Fuck that noise."

"Or maybe a reading group at the library. Hell, just find a video game you like and see if there's anyone around that'd want to play with you. You've got options, Hidan."

"Yeah, and they all suck," the silver-haired teen grumbled. Any additional complaining he might have subjected the banker to was silenced by the sudden appearance of Marin letting them know that dinner was ready. Moments later, the three of them were seated at the dinner table.

The dinner might have been awkward, were it not for the fact that Hidan kept talking and talking so that there wasn't a single free moment for discomfort to creep into their dinner. Hidan seemed to know exactly what sort of questions his mother was planning to ask Kakuzu and answered all of them before she even had a chance to voice her inquiry. Kakuzu, for his part, sat quietly and did his best not to look like a teen-molesting pervert.

"-and then the microwave caught on fire," Hidan went on, "since dumbass forgot to tell me to take the soup out of the Jashin-damned can-"

"Because it was obvious," Kakuzu cut it flatly.

"-and there went the rest of my paycheck."

Marin shook her head at her son's idiocy. "Well at least you had the decency to pay for it." She glanced up to check the clock in the kitchen, which indicated that it was nearly nine o' clock now. "Hidan, would you mind getting the brownies now? They should be cool enough to serve with the ice cream."

"Sure mom," Hidan agreed. He gave Kakuzu one last look, either warning the banker or just worrying over him, before he exited the room. Moments later, Kakuzu and Marin could hear the sound of cabinets opening and china being set on the countertop.

The banker focused on keeping his breathing slow and steady, not wanting to appear nervous now that he was alone with Marin. Sending Hidan out of the room had clearly been a calculated move, and he wasn't entirely sure what Marin's plan was. "So," he began, unsure of what else to say.

"You can stop sweating bullets," Marin commented with a very Hidan-ish roll of her eyes. "This dinner went well; though I can't really say I got the chance to know you since my son did almost all of the talking tonight."

"Hidan was just nervous," Kakuzu explained. "He can't keep his mouth shut when something happens to stress him out."

"I know," Marin said with a sigh. "I was always hoping he'd grow out of that particular problem. Though not as much as I'd like him to stop showing up at my bar and picking fights with the patrons."

Kakuzu quirked a brow at this. "He gets into bar fights?"

"All the time!" Marin declared. "Here he goes and moves out of our apartment, being super vague about who he's staying with and never stopping by home to see me, but about once a month he'll randomly pop up at my job and pick a fight with whatever asshole makes a pass at me or tries to grab my ass. Usually it doesn't get violent; the jerk just swears at us and walks out. But a couple of times it's come to blows, and Hidan goes home with a black eye or a couple of tufts of hair missing."

"Hidan came back to the apartment a couple of times looking beaten up," Kakuzu commented. "But he'd never tell me what happened. Though I guess I can't blame him now; I picked him up because I thought he was homeless, so telling me he was defending his mother's honor would have opened the gates for a flood of questions he probably didn't want to deal with."

"Has he told you why he left in the first place?" Marin asked. "I still can't get a straight answer out of him."

"No."

Marin sighed and shook her head. "Sometimes I wish I could just cut a hole in my son's skull and look inside to see what he's thinking."

"I don't think I want to know what goes on in there," Kakuzu dead-panned.

Marin snorted at this and took a sip of her water. "Look, just so you know I'm not passing judgment on you yet. This is one dinner; it's not a good measure of what kind of person you are. Whether things went good or bad tonight, I wasn't planning on making a final call about whether you can still hang around my son."

"I see," Kakuzu replied, trying to hide his disappointment in the mother's assessment.

"However," Marin went on, "your behavior has convinced me that another dinner with the three of us would be perfectly fine. Maybe sometime next week?"

"Any night would be fine," Kakuzu quickly agreed, already planning to rearrange his schedule to whatever would fit in the Neco family's needs.

"Sounds good," Marin said with a smile. "Now I hope Hidan is just having trouble with the dessert and not hiding outside the doorway eavesdropping!"

Kakuzu resisted the urge to rub his temples in agitation as he heard the sound of feet scrambling across the kitchen linoleum, before Hidan reappeared in the doorway holding three bowls of brownies with ice cream on top. "Hi guys! Sorry, the ice cream was super frozen and I couldn't scoop it so I had to let it thaw and then I couldn't find a knife to cut the brownies but now everything's good so we can eat!"

"Smooth, Hidan," Kakuzu internally commented. "Smooth as sandpaper."

The rest of the dinner went by rather quickly, and soon enough Marin was in the kitchen doing the dishes while Hidan was showing Kakuzu to the door. "You think it went well?" Hidan asked. "I mean really, I couldn't see mom when she was talking so I don't know if she was being fucking sarcastic or anything."

"She seemed sincere in wanting us to have another dinner," Kakuzu answered. "Thanks, by the way."

"For what?"

"Bending over backwards to help me tonight. But let me do at least some of the talking next time, ok?"

"Jackass. I only talked so much because I couldn't trust you not to say something stupid that would fuck everything up."

"Really," Kakuzu said with a smirk. "So you weren't nervous at all."

"Fuck no!" Hidan snapped as his cheeks turned red. "You're the one who panics over stupid shit like a family dinner!"

"Uh-huh. Suuuure."

"Oh go to hell," Hidan grumbled, pouting now.

Kakuzu shook his head and ruffled Hidan's hair one more time, making the Jashinist swear and swat him away. "I'll see you around, Hidan."

"Yeah yeah, see you later," Hidan mumbled as Kakuzu exited the apartment. Once the banker was gone, Hidan slowly moved his hand to his hair and ran his fingers over the part of his scalp that the banker had touched. He shut his eyes and focused on the warmth and strength he'd felt in that hand, wondering what it would be like if Kakuzu would have moved the hand lower to touch Hidan's cheek, or neck, or lips…

"Hidan, we need to put up the leftovers before they spoil!" Marin called out.

Hidan's eyes snapped open as a fresh blush covered his cheeks. At least his mom hadn't walked in on him fantasizing; that would've been awkward. "Coming!" he called back and hurried into the kitchen, deciding that he could save his fantasies for later that night after his mom had gone to bed and he was safe within the privacy of his own room.