A/N: Just something that kinda happened. Not feeling good right now. Few words. Hope you like it.

Enjoy the question.

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Kakuzu

The card game had been nice. But with his new awareness, Kakuzu had sensed an undercurrent of tension in himself the whole time. Even good times at the damned base were being tarnished by that thing. Hidan wasn't going to wake up for a while, so why the hell not just leave?

"Interesting house," Konan murmured. "It is unlike houses in my world." She walked in a circle around his living room, politely not touching anything. Meanwhile, Kakuzu sat on the floor before the TV and took a deep breath. He brought up all the good memories he had of being here. Hidan chewing on things. Hidan staring at nature documentaries with rapt attention, hanging onto every motion, every flick of every tail he saw there. Who else could learn a trade from nature documentaries? Kakuzu remembered Hidan chewing on his hand sometimes. It had been easy back then: he let Hidan chew on his arm because Hidan was small and relatively powerless and Kakuzu rested easy in the knowledge that he could not be hurt. What he wouldn't give to have that simplicity back now. That security.

"He stayed here sometimes," Kakuzu recollected. "When weather was bad, or when it was good and he wanted ice cream. Sometimes when he just wanted company. There was no pattern to it."

Konan sat next to him. "What was he like as a young boy?"

"Ferocious," Kakuzu replied. "In a cute way, but still. He was…" Kakuzu fell silent. How could he describe something so hard to pinpoint?

Konan remained silent. She continued to look at him, waiting for Kakuzu to continue. He appreciated it. Kakuzu suddenly realized something. We are the only two people who know anything at all about him. About what he is, whatever that is. Kakuzu shied away from thinking directly about that. He had the feeling it would be like looking into the Ark in that one Indiana Jones movie where everyone who looked got their faces melted off.

But that thought helped him describe what he was struggling to put into words. "He never acted like a kid," Kakuzu said. "He never acted like I'd rescued him, like I was older than him, or anything else deserving of respect. He treated me just like a large, sturdy playmate. Someone with no power over him at all. It should have been annoying."

"But it was not annoying to have him recognize you as an equal?" Konan guessed.

"The one thing I've never wanted is to be saddled with all kinds of responsibility towards other people. I especially do not want to look after kids." Kakuzu shook his head. That way lay trouble. Why take care of brats who were going to demand all these things from him just so they could survive long enough to grow up into ungrateful jerks who did nothing for him in return? "Not acting like a normal kid was a relief."

"What did he act like? If he did not turn to you for reassurance, or take guidance from you, or accept rules and discipline, then what did he do as a boy?"

"We watched documentaries on this television." Kakuzu gestured at the TV. "Nature documentaries mostly, though some were about people in distant parts of the world. He watched animals, and mimicked them. He learned how to stalk from televised lions."

"Hmm." Konan studied the television. "What did he learn from them? What are lions like?"

Kakuzu glanced at her. Her world has no analog to Africa? Just how small is it? "Lions are large cats that live in groups. The male or males in charge - sometimes brothers team up to lead a pride together - keep out rival males and look after the cubs, while the females go out hunting. They use team strategies to hunt. Lion cubs like to pounce on tails and wrestle each other. Essentially, he learned to be very cuddly, nurturing, and attentive."

"Really?" Konan sounded surprised, which meant she must have been downright astonished. "There are large hunters that live socially in this world?"

"Yes…" Kakuzu narrowed his eyes. "What kinds of animals do you have in your world?"

"Large hunters typically live alone in the forest," Konan answered. "Tigers, bears, etc. There are wolves, but they aren't the type of dominant predator I imagine he would model himself off of." Konan tilted her head. "There are other large cats in some parts of the world, but of course they live alone. The idea of a sociable cat is very strange to me."

"What kind of a world has tigers, but no lions?" Kakuzu asked rhetorically.

"A world in which shinobi exist," Konan answered. "It is not a kind world. I cannot imagine how such kind, attentive creatures as you describe could survive."

"What was your Hidan like?" Kakuzu asked. "He learned from tigers, presumably."

Konan sat very quietly. "No." She did not elaborate.

Kakuzu let her sit in silence, in case she was thinking of a more complex answer. She continued to say nothing, nor tilt her head or narrow her eyes or do anything to indicate thinking. She stared at the television as if she was watching something on it, though the screen was blank. Kakuzu narrowed his eyes. What is she thinking?

He was surprised to find that he actually wanted to know. Now that he knew what effect the symbol was having on him, he had reminded himself on the way out here that his suspicions about the world were not completely justified and he should relax. His efforts had worked. Kakuzu checked with his body, and found that he felt perfectly comfortable. No part of him was tense against the possibility of his skin being slashed open or torn into. And a curiosity he had never entirely banished, had accepted as a sort-of friend, had returned.

Konan stood up. "Maybe I see other parts of your residence?" Excessive formality had returned, with a vengeance. Business Mode was back. Kakuzu's question had backfired spectacularly. He wished he knew how and why.

He nodded at her and stood up to give her a kind of tour. While doing so, he thought of possible reasons why she would close off this line of questioning, and possible ways he could get her to answer him again. Maybe Other Hidan was a unique brand of terrible that she doesn't want to talk about. Maybe he learned everything he knew from shinobi, who she seems to have a terrible opinion of, despite being one herself. Kakuzu filed that away as another item of interest. Perhaps she's offended that I immediately leaped to a conclusion about what Other Hidan was like. I shouldn't offer up guesses like that again. I have no reason to think that he would do anything in the same way the Hidan I know did. Maybe he didn't model himself after any kind of animal at all. He could just be a garden variety mass murderer. Or a vampire - can't forget about those. I should not assume things again.

"Ah," Konan exclaimed as they approached the computer desk. "A computer. It is strange to see one here."

"Why?" Kakuzu asked.

"Only the library had these. Ordinary people carry around smaller devices. I had assumed these large versions were special, a more powerful technology that ordinary people do not need access to most of the time." She glanced sideways at him. "Is that not correct?"

Kakuzu snorted. "No, but it should be. Personally, I've always preferred full-size computers. They are much easier to use than tiny, fragile devices when you have large hands." Kakuzu turned the computer on and sat down in the computer chair. "But laptops and phones are actually just as powerful. Large computers like these are considered outdated."

Konan wrinkled her brow. "If they are just as powerful, but easier to use, why would they be considered...what is the term you used?"

"Outdated."

Konan leaned down over his left shoulder to watch the computer as it booted up. "What does that word mean? The way you used it indicates it is bad."

Kakuzu growled. "That's another thing I don't agree with. Outdated things are considered bad, but they shouldn't be." He looked up at her. We have more in common than I thought. She may not be as old as I am, but she hasn't grown up being suckered by all this technology. She can still think critically about it.

"Does this word have something to do with time?" she asked.

"Yes." Kakuzu opened a web browser. "It's another word for old. It's not the newest thing, something else has come along that has new features, etcetera. And yes, before you ask, new is considered to be a good thing. If something is new, it's automatically thought to be an improvement, as if we live in an age of constant upward progress." Kakuzu knew he was starting to rant. But he was away from the symbol, so the rant not only felt justified but good. It felt useful in a way that rants born from frustration and anger with the symbol did not. He approved of this rant.

Konan remained silent. Sensible girl. "Idiots," Kakuzu growled. "I'm sure everyone thinks that. You either live in an age where everything seems brighter and better and sunnier every day, or you live in an age where people wander the streets forecasting the end of the world. No in between. But neither of those predictions ever comes true. The world never ends, and everything that happens turns out to be flawed, just like everything that happened before." He turned the chair around to face her. "I'm old enough to have seen this for myself. Now I feel like I'm surrounded by idiots who have not so much as a scrap of sense in their heads, and who refuse to learn any. Is it any wonder that I don't like kids?" Actually, children are fine. Children are harmless and like to learn things. Again, it's the people they grow into that are wastes of space. But I don't need to waste time on technicalities.

"This is a better situation than that of my world," Konan said.

Kakuzu, as of yet, did not know anything about her world that was comparable to the technical and societal progress of his world. He steepled his fingers. "Enlighten me."

"My world is close to stagnant," Konan said. She turned away. "There used to be warring clans. Those clans have settled down into villages, which seemed to be a good thing, but in reality they have only continued to wage war, this time on a larger scale. Instead of clan versus clan, it is country versus country. The basic inability to get along with one another has not changed." She closed her eyes. "The Akatsuki was founded to be a peacemaking organization. It failed. No effort to make peace has yet succeeded. War follows on war. This is simply the way people live. It has been for centuries."

She shook her head. "No," she whispered, as if to herself. "I must continue to have hope." She turned back to face Kakuzu. "Yet it is hard to have hope when, as far as I know, the world has never been different. Shinobi are part and parcel of life, and shinobi are warriors. Where warriors exist, there must be a battle for them to fight. In order to simply survive, one must become a warrior too, and the cycle continues."

Kakuzu identified a weak point in this cycle immediately. "Who said shinobi have to be warriors? None of us plan to be."

Konan looked away. Kakuzu thought he briefly saw her wince. "That is true. But it is a nonexistent idea in my world, and…" She trailed off. Before awkwardness could descend, she covered herself with a shrug. "It is not worth talking about."

Kakuzu tilted his head. Why did she lose her composure just now? Something's wrong. There is something she's not telling me. "Why not?"

Konan's face went blank, and her body still. Dammit! He'd probed in the wrong way again, and she'd locked up. Kakuzu stifled a snarl of frustration. Levelly, Konan replied, "I do not wish to talk about my world any more. May I ask how else this device can be used?"

Kakuzu got up from the chair. "Enjoy." While she does that, I can figure out what is wrong with my questions.

Konan sat down. "Hidan showed me how to use this search bar to ask questions."

"It can do more than that," Kakuzu told her. "You can ask it to give you things. Games. Music. Pictures. Search for anything you can receive from a computer, and it'll do its best to give you that thing."

Konan searched for games. Kakuzu guessed she was going to be busy for a while, since computer games were completely alien to her world. Kakuzu backed up to the kitchen entryway and leaned against it to think.

Perhaps the problem isn't how I'm asking, but what I'm asking about. She said she doesn't want to talk about her world. But I want to ask about her world. More importantly, I am now curious about why she doesn't want to talk about her world. How can I ask about it without asking about it? Kakuzu had never been especially adept at manipulating conversation to suit his needs. He preferred blunter methods, but those would not work on her. He crossed his arms even tighter.

Konan continued to click and scroll among pages filled with colorful animated pictures and silly names, but her eyes narrowed slightly. "You seem tense," she said without turning around.

Kakuzu decided to follow the rules he used when trying to fleece others out of their money. Don't show my hand, and don't play someone else's game. "I am."

"Is something wrong?"

"You already know the answer to that."

"Perhaps, but would you tell me anyway?"

Shit. She's playing by the same rules. Kakuzu closed his eyes. He was out of his depth. It was not his day to get answers. I'll wait for another day. That's fine.

Konan closed a game she had opened and started to play. It was interesting, but not nearly as important as whatever was happening here. She turned the chair around. "What do you think I know?" she asked directly.

Kakuzu chose his words carefully. "Something new."

"And unlike other people of this world, you do not believe newness to be a good thing."

"If it was a good thing, you would be willing to talk about it."

Konan tightened her fingers on the chair's armrests. "Correct."

Kakuzu snorted. "I know better than to try to pry now. You'd take my head off." He sighed. "Who does this affect, and how much?"

Konan's gaze fell to the floor. "The only people directly affected are myself and the demon boy."

"Indirectly?"

"The only others affected even indirectly are those who hear the news and react with fear. It does not concern anyone else."

"Bullshit." Kakuzu glared at her. "I want to know about Other Hidan, and I don't get to. That is an effect."

Konan almost, but not quite, scowled. "Not everything has to be shared."

"Fine." Kakuzu pushed himself off the side of the entryway. "I'll see what needs dusting, and you can waste your time online."

He left. Konan watched the kitchen entryway for a couple moments, then turned back to the computer, shaking her head.

Deidara

After Konan left, Deidara called the calmest person he knew, the most rational, the least likely to freak out or even look surprised. He called Itachi. Itachi gave directions to an apartment in town, and stated that the door would be unlocked. Deidara walked in to find a nearly empty apartment. There was furniture: a couch and a table. A television set in front of the couch, and a couple of chairs around the table. They looked like the deciding factor in their purchase had been cost, with usability coming in second and nothing else even making the ranking.

"This looks like the world's saddest college dorm, yeah," Deidara announced to the empty room.

"It is," Itachi said from another room. "I shared this place with Kisame before Konan appeared. Neither of us has ever had much desire for items."

"There's items, and then there's... " Something much more important. Something beyond mere material objects. Proof that anyone lived here, maybe? Signs that this was somebody's home? Deidara was relieved to see a trinket on a windowsill. It made him feel less like he was in a minimalist design laboratory.

Itachi came out of the other room, and politely gestured for Deidara to sit on the couch. "Some things have been moved," he said. "The apartment does look very bare now. Despite that, I feel a sense of peace here."

Deidara shivered. "Sasori would make things for me," he confided. "Out of scraps or other random stuff. I'm used to being around stuff, hm. It doesn't feel right to have no stuff filling up the corners or anything."

Itachi apologized. "I am sorry. I thought simply being away from the symbol would be helpful to you, as it is to me."

Deidara looked around. "It does feel a lot less...risky here. Not risky, hm. I just don't have the word for it." The word he was looking for was catastrophic. It always felt like activities held at the base had great meaning and weight behind them, and a single misstep could be a grave mistake. Here, for the first time in a long time, Deidara considered just lying on the floor and not doing anything. Maybe what the demon boy had said wasn't so important, after all. Maybe everything would stay okay without him paying attention to it for a little while.

Itachi lay down the floor across from him, their heads pointing toward a common center. That meant neither of them could see the other. When Itachi said, "To me, it is easier to think here," it was like a disembodied voice was saying it. There was nothing for Deidara to look at, nothing to pay attention to. Just a voice.

"That's good, because I need some heavy-duty thinking, yeah," he replied. Speaking to nothing in particular was oddly pleasant. It didn't feel weird at all. It was relaxing, to have nothing to concentrate on and nothing concentrating on him. It was freeing.

"On what?"

"Some stuff the demon kid said, hm."

"The demon boy is a very subject to think about. What are you thinking about him?"

Deidara wrinkled his brow. "I'm not thinking about him, yeah. I don't want to think about the stuff he told me about himself yet. He told me things about the world."

"The world," Itachi repeated. "I have been thinking very much about it recently."

"What've you been thinking about, hm?"

"It is possible that the world is not what we think it is." Itachi remembered looking up at the stars, wondering if he was seeing through an invisible barrier to the real stars on the other side. "It is possible this is not a world at all."

Deidara's throat dried. "What else could it be?"

"Somewhere special. Perhaps a pocket dimension of some kind." Itachi took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"What about…" Deidara swallowed. "What about the middle of a Venn diagram?"

"Yes," Itachi answered immediately. "A place where two become one."

"Or none," Deidara whispered.

"None?"

"Are worlds additive or subtractive?"

Itachi called to mind everything he knew about worlds colliding, from human history where worldviews and cultures had clashed before. "Neither. In a sense, they are both destroyed, but in another sense, they both survive. When worlds meet, each of them is transformed into something different from what it was before."

"So this place is like a whole separate third world," Deidara concluded. "Not the real world or the ninja world, yeah."

"Yes. We are fundamentally different from either ninjas or ordinary people."

"But…" Deidara shivered. "But what about the rest?"

"They are as they were before."

"How?" Deidara closed his eyes and tried to imagine a whole world losing a piece of itself. How could a broken world possibly survive? "Aren't the circles in a Venn diagram technically broken?"

Itachi considered that question. "Interesting question. Are they, or aren't they? Their curves continue so that a whole circle can be made out. It is not like that portion in the middle becomes disconnected, develops a gap between itself and the rest of the circle."

"What's the difference between a line and a gap?" Deidara asked. "If the line can't be crossed, isn't it the same thing as a really thin but impossibly wide gap?"

"It seems like there has to be a difference, but I can't think of what it is," Itachi admitted.

"The demon kid said that only someone without a body can cross, and even then almost anyone would be torn apart. No getting in, or out. We're cut off, yeah." Deidara gulped. "So what does that mean for the rest of the world?"

Itachi took several minutes to digest this information. Deidara did, too. So, we kind of have a whole separate world, and it's made of pieces of other worlds. Where did it get those pieces from? Are the other worlds missing them? What's going to happen? You can't have worlds stealing parts of each other forever, hm.

"It's like we live in a scrap heap, hm," he whispered.

Itachi closed his eyes and tried to soothe himself. "If so… It is a remarkably functional one."

"Yeah." Deidara sniffed. "Maybe we got representative scraps, hm, so the other worlds aren't missing entire parts of themselves. Maybe they're okay for now."

"Maybe there are ways to heal entire worlds, and not just people," Itachi said.

"Hm?"

"I have been spending a lot of time here over the past couple of days," Itachi confessed. "I've been thinking about what it means that souls can be torn apart, healed, separated, yet put back together. The only thing that can explain that is if souls are more fluid than solid. If fluid, then it's not accurate to say that they can be broken at all."

"How do you know souls can do all that, yeah?"

"The bartender told me. I faced my fears and returned to the bar where the succubus attacked. I told the bartender what had happened. He threw a fit and told me what was supposed to happen."

"There are rules for demons?"

"Apparently so. They are not just random beings who happen to reside here, as we thought. They are known and accommodated."

"What's supposed to happen, hm?"

"The demons are allowed to take parts of people's souls, If only a very small part is lost, it feels pleasant, apparently. He stated that it had to be entirely consensual. As if soul-stealing is something normal and natural like lovemaking." Itachi's voice made it clear that he did not agree.

"But souls can be healed?"

"Yes. He recommended several different sites I could go to to have my soul healed, depending on my spirituality. Every single religious group in this town offers a service where they can heal your soul."

"What the fuck?"

"I couldn't believe it either. I've never heard of such a thing."

"How the fuck does it work, hm?"

"He did not tell me. I would have to ask someone at the church myself."

"No, not the service. The soul healing." Deidara's head spun. "How the fuck can that work? Are souls like, like ice or something, where it's all patterned and you can make new ice based off the pattern of old ice? Or do they take parts of soul from somewhere else and patch it onto yours, like a skin graft? Where does all this soul come from if the demons are eating it? It has to be coming from somewhere, or else the total amount of soul is draining out…" Deidara realized too late that he had horrified himself into silence. Oh my god.

"You may be right about souls being like ice," Itachi said. "If they are fluid, then they aren't divided into different parts. If any part of a fluid soul changes, the entire thing will change its basic nature, as if you put a pinch of salt into one side of a pool of water. Eventually it would spread. If more soul material can be generated somehow, the soul that was there before could introduce these same changes to it, as if you poured fresh water into salt water."

"Does everybody have the ability to just make more soul?" Deidara asked. "Or do religious places tap into something else that makes more soul, like a soul generator? Is a person's soul like a part of themselves, or is it something that doesn't belong to them, something that God or whoever made up and put in their body?"

"I would need more evidence to come to any conclusion."

"Where did we really come from, Itachi?"

Itachi sighed. "I don't know."

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A/N: Nng. If the last part of this chapter feels kinda flat, you know why. *Yawn*

The two sources of conflict in this story: people talking to each other too much, or not enough. That's basically all that happens here. In this chapter, the second one.