Despite his best attempts to temper his expectations, Kakuzu realised he'd been allowing himself to believe that once they were home everything would be plain sailing. It wasn't, but for surprising reasons. He'd anticipated the problem of all the stairs, and was preparing to rearrange so that the rooms on the ground floor - which housed his favourite pieces from his private collection, along with his library of first editions - could be made into a fully accessible living area. But what was worse was the emotional trauma associated with almost every aspect of the house. Hidan had a full blown panic attack when he looked at the kitchen desk where he'd called the vets about Tsuchi and received the 'hospital' phone call. The bathroom with the willow patterned toilet made him cry. He didn't even want to look into the master bedroom. They slept in the spare room on the first floor that first night back, and although it felt so good to be holding him properly again in a bed that was actually big enough to comfortably accommodate them, Kakuzu felt like he was appreciating for the first time just how broken he still was. His physical recovery had barely scratched the surface of the mental trauma.
The first trauma, though, was the hall mirror. Hidan had barely looked at himself at all during his stay in hospital - the toilets near the ICU didn't have them, and he hadn't often wanted to be brought one. Even when he had seen himself, the bright lights and clinical setting had made everything unfamiliar. But Kakuzu's hall, where countless times he'd caught his own eye and flashed himself an appreciative sultry grin - that was different. And now, after the massive effort of climbing the front steps, he gripped hard onto the edge of the hall sideboard and stared grimly at his reflection. "Fuck," he said, his voice breaking.
Kakuzu, half a pace behind, put his arms around him, trying to comfort him - but that brought him into the reflection too, and the contrast was stark. Hidan's eyes brimmed with tears. "I look like a skeleton! I look like fucking Nagato Pein!"
"No, love..." Kakuzu tried to reassure him, but Hidan pushed him away.
"I don't know how you can bear to touch me," he sobbed, then just crumpled down onto the hall floor and cried and cried. For a few more minutes he still fended Kakuzu off when he tried to hold him, but finally he ran out of strength and allowed himself to be gathered in against his chest. He slumped against Kakuzu's shoulder and Kakuzu felt his tears seeping through his shirt. In that moment he almost felt like crying as well. It was stupid, but the rejection cut him to the quick. In the whole of their time in hospital he'd never done that. Why, now that they were home?
"You don't look like Nagato Pein," he told him quietly, as soon as he could trust himself to speak. He leant back against the bookcase and stared blankly at the opposite wall. "But even if you did it wouldn't matter to me."
"Bullshit," Hidan muttered hoarsely. "You fell in love with my face, you said so."
"It's not bullshit." Kakuzu kissed the top of his head. "I fell in love with the look in your eyes, as much as anything. And that turned out to be just pure, unfiltered you . And you're still beautiful anyway."
Bur Hidan just made a dismissive sound and looked away from him again. For a few minutes more they sat in uncomfortable silence - and then his attention seemed to be caught by something poking out from under the bookcase. A little triangle of white. He pulled it out - an envelope. With Kakuzu's name on it in a bold slanting script, and a little tab of sellotape still stuck to the side. Mutely he held it out to him.
Kakuzu took it and opened it. It was a postcard of a sketch by Kakashi Hatake, he recognised it from a show he'd been to a few years ago. The back of the card was covered with the same slanting scrawl as the envelope:
Sorry Kakuzu, you'll have to let the younger generation do things their own way this time. Naruto and I won't be selling our work to you - and neither will our friends, so please stop approaching them, it's getting embarrassing. Thanks for the tip about Tobi Uchiha though - turns out he's an old acquaintance. By the time you get this he'll know that I'm on to him and so will the police - you might just want to lose those Akatsuki shares. Hope these will sweeten the pill. Kakashi
A chill ran through him. Hidan was trembling. He touched the tab of sellotape, clogged up with dust and dog hair now, but with a torn scrap of beige and gold paper still clinging to it. "It's from the box," he said. "The chocolate box. It was him? "
"But... he's got dogs of his own!" Kakuzu said in disbelief. "How could he? How could he take the risk?! He couldn't assume they wouldn't be in the hall!"
"Zabuza must've told him you were after his work," Hidan said hoarsely. "He'd gone by the time the others came inside. He probably went straight to Kakashi and told him."
Kakuzu closed his eyes a moment. Tsuchi had died for this petty art market wrangling. It was unbearable. "I suppose maybe he thought we'd still be up," he said. "But… it must have been after Kim and Karin left."
"Or they put them up there." Hidan gestured at the top of the bookcase. His voice was miserable. "They wouldn't know. But she- Tsuchi could've got them down."
Kakuzu nodded. She could. And however it had happened, it was so stupid, so avoidable. Perhaps he should have had a cage fitted to the letterbox. But he'd prided himself on how well trained the dogs were. And Kaze liked to bring him his post and the newspapers... Even Tsuchi, the most wilful of them, would normally have waited for his command before eating anything. But of course, that night, nothing had been normal. She must have been so upset, he thought wretchedly. Terrified and disturbed, in fact. She'd seen him carried unconscious out of the door and Hidan in god only knew what kind of state. And the shouting and the sirens and strangers in the house. That grief like a block in his mind was back and he stared at the card in his hand, then crumpled it savagely into a ball.
Surprisingly, Hidan's hand covered his own. "I'm sorry…" he whispered, sounding so broken that it brought Kakuzu back to himself. He couldn't let this send Hidan spiralling downwards again. Get a grip, he told himself.
He crushed the card into an even smaller ball, but that was all the emotional outlet he afforded himself. "Don't be," he said firmly, lobbing it across the hall into the waste paper basket, then taking Hidan's face in his hands. "It's not your fault."
When they woke in the morning in the spare room, without the routine of the hospital, Hidan seemed lost and enervated. They barely made it out of the house in time to get to the hospital for his 10am physio appointment - taking a long route round to avoid passing South End Green. When they got back he ate a tiny amount of lunch and then went to sleep on the settee. The living room seemed to be the only place in the house that didn't upset him.
The next few days were much the same. He didn't want to wake up in the morning, he was confused and forgetful. Kakuzu had to completely take charge of his numerous medications; had to remind him to eat and drink - and even more than in the hospital he needed to be buoyed up and distracted every minute of the day.
Like Kabuto had hinted - and Kakuzu hadn't really believed - it was exhausting, the more so because he was trying to set a lot of financial affairs in order as well. It was much too late to avail himself of the advice from Kakashi's note and he had lost a lot of money in Akatsuki shares. Tobi had not only vanished, but he was being prosecuted in his absence for embezzlement, tax evasion and identity fraud. Kakashi's evidence had revealed him to be the very Obito Uchiha presumed drowned on his gap year in Laos, and that had been all that was needed to connect him to the criminal activities begun by 'Uncle Madara' and built on by himself. More and more shocking details were coming to light, and the entire Akatsuki organisation had gone into liquidation to pay off Tobi's debts. Kakuzu was only glad that Nagato Pein had bought him out of his majority all those years ago. Because of that he supposed he was probably the least affected of all of them. Konan had lost Akatsuki Gallery, Kisame's job had vanished from under him. Zetsu and Deidara were left suddenly without any gallery representation or financial backing, and moreover had lost the rights to important pieces of their own which had been officially in the Akatsuki collection.
Now, what with Yahiko also gone, Kakuzu was the only one left who could sort out the private interests of the Akatsuki Group's members from those that had been held by the company, and therefore owned by Tobi. He was doing his best to claw back as much as he could, but the situation was pretty dire. As well as that, he was also conscious that he needed to make some acquisitions for his private collection if it was to remain the edgy and forward-looking body of work that he liked it to be. That was important for keeping up the value of everything in it. But he'd missed all the degree shows, and it was impossible to take the time to go into central London now anyway - or for pretty much anything else during the daytime.
He had a lot of late night phone conversations after he settled Hidan to sleep in the evenings - with Konan discussing the plans for her new arts cooperative, and the possibility of exhibiting some of his collection permanently as a part of it - and with Karin and Zetsu about the contemporary scene. He'd started sending Karin round open studios and project spaces on his behalf and was seriously considering employing her to help him manage his collection as well. Zetsu was a useful contact as he always knew everything that was going on and who to look out for - also he'd been doing his best to care for Deidara since he'd come out of hospital. Very often he needed the advice of someone with more medical experience, or - it seemed to Kakuzu - simply some common sense.
For Deidara there was another complication - he had been charged with arson for causing the explosion that blew up his building. Court proceedings had been delayed while he was in hospital, but the prosecution was now well underway. One of the last things the Akatsuki Group had done before being officially dissolved was pay for his bail, but that was the last help they were able to give him as an organisation. Disastrously, in Kakuzu's opinion, Deidara was insisting on representing himself, and without the heft of the Akatsuki legal team behind him it was difficult to see how he'd avoid a custodial sentence. He was doing his best to try and help him prepare a defence, and repeatedly invited him to come and stay with himself and Hidan. He thought Deidara might be softening to that idea, but he was even more stubborn than Hidan - it didn't do to push the point too much.
One positive thing about all the stress and intrigue was that it diverted Hidan a little from his pain and anxiety. He was very interested in all the developments, and made Kakuzu tell him everything he'd discovered during the night over breakfast each morning. And that made him distracted enough to actually eat a little, which was still one of the things he found most difficult, having spent too long being fed intravenously in the ICU. Kakuzu set himself up a work space at the living room bureau so that he could keep him company, and Hidan listened to all his phone calls and gleaned whatever he could from them. He was particularly amused by the idea of Tobi being a fugitive from justice - Deidara had categorically stated that he left the building moments before the explosion, so none of them were in any doubt that he was alive - and the memory of him reclining on the Chesterfield under a pile of dogs, wearing nothing but his dressing gown and laughing at the misfortunes of others sustained Kakuzu through quite a few more difficult times.
Another thing that made Kakuzu happy to see was the development of Hidan's relationship with the dogs now that he was around the house all the time. Kaze and Kaminari became even more fiercely protective of him than ever, and Mizu - always the most emotionally attuned of them - would actually come and fetch Kakuzu if he was unhappy or in pain. Sometimes she even noticed before Kakuzu did if Hidan was trying to hide his discomfort - which he did often because he hated to take anything for it. Hidan accused her of ratting him out, but Kakuzu could tell it was with affection. Slightly less conveniently, they growled if anyone but Kakuzu touched him which hurt Kisame's feelings when he came round to help out. But all in all that satisfied Kakuzu. They were finally fulfilling their function as guard dogs, and he knew that they would not hesitate to attack if Hidan was ever threatened. Not that that was remotely likely, since he refused to leave the house without Kakuzu, and Kakuzu wouldn't leave him in the house alone. But still.
In the afternoon towards the end of their first week back a pair of police officers - a man and a woman - came to officially interview Hidan about what they called 'the incident'. It upset him beyond even Kakuzu's most pessimistic expectations, and he had to shut the dogs in the kitchen as Mizu, seeing his distress, insisted on keeping up a low guttural growling despite Kakuzu's repeated admonishments. It upset Kakuzu too, to be honest, hearing Hidan speak about it at length, seeing how far from in control he was emotionally, and how ashamed and even disgusted he was by that. The process also took an unreasonably long time. After a lot of pointless bureaucracy and faff they made him go through everything; from the beginning of the party to Kakuzu's cardiac arrest; everything that had happened in the hospital - including his altercation with Shikamaru in the waiting room of the CCU - until when they finally they reached the part that even alone with Kakuzu he could hardly bear to talk or think about he was already exhausted.
"It was about 2.30 in the morning," he said quietly, looking down at his hands. "I'd just been on the phone to the vets because one of the dogs-" He broke off, biting his lip. Kakuzu took his hand. "One of the dogs had died. She'd- she'd eaten chocolate." His voice dropped to a mumble. "They were all over the hall when I got in from the hospital."
"Can you speak a little louder, Hidan," the female officer said. She probably meant to sound kind, but it came over as patronising. Kakuzu glared at her.
Hidan managed to raise his voice for a couple of sentences. "Then, before I had time to- before I'd- my mobile rang," he said, with effort. "It was a woman's voice. She said she was a nurse in the CCU, and that Kakuzu was back in surgery with an - an occluded stent... and I should come in straight away." He gripped Kakuzu's hand so tightly it was painful. "So I got on my bike and went… and at South End Green a car door opened right in front of me and I… that was…" He dashed his free hand across his eyes. He cried so easily now. And his voice was nearly inaudible again as he said, "I went over the handlebars. I guess I hit my head because I blacked out, and when I came round I was on the road and the car was gone."
"I- I think I got up and tried to get my bike off the road…. And that's when he… Shikamaru Nara-" Hidan shivered. "He… came out into the road. He picked up my phone and wouldn't give it to me. He was… taunting me, he knew about Kakuzu… And then it started ringing. He said it was- said did I think it was the hospital- I don't know if it was the hospital, but, but then I thought so. I tried to get it from him - the phone I mean - but he moved out of the way and somehow he tripped me, or. No… I guess he kicked my legs from under me and then I was just falling…"
He looked up, his eyes glassy. "I just remember seeing the sky… the stars swinging round and then everything going black…" He didn't seem to be seeing the room in front of him anymore. "Then it was like he was miles above me, in this little square of light…" His mouth twisted as he struggled to keep control of himself. "The last thing I remember was him throwing the phone down after me, saying, it's your last chance. And... it smashed."
There was silence in the room for a moment. Then, "that doesn't quite tally up with your previous statement, Hidan," the female officer was saying.
"He hasn't made any other statement," Kakuzu objected sharply.
"It says here-"
"That was taken down in the ICU, when he was hallucinating and on and off a ventilator. It shouldn't be on file." Kakuzu stood up. "You can refer to my statement from that day, if you must. That's all that should have been recorded. Now, perhaps, unless you have any questions about this statement… I think Hidan has talked about it enough."
He wouldn't let them ask any more questions, but already it was more than enough. When he came back to the living room after showing them out Hidan was hunched miserably on the settee, white and drawn, staring at nothing, and Kakuzu knew he had to make some kind of a change. It was sunny outside, early September sunlight, but in the room it felt dark. "Let's go out," he suggested suddenly. "You need to get out of here."
Hidan didn't disagree, but shrugged a thin shoulder hopelessly. "How? I can barely walk across the fucking room…"
"So we'll drive somewhere." Kakuzu went over to him and made him get up. "Somewhere out of London. Come on."
It was a good decision - Hidan realised that as soon as Kakuzu shut the passenger door on him. He hadn't wanted to, but once he was settled into the comfortable leather seat, with the sun coming in through the window and no pressure to do anything he wasn't up to, he felt like he was coming to life a little. The main difference, though, was simply that he felt safe. And it was only then that he realised what the sickened, unsettled feeling he'd been struggling with ever since leaving the hospital actually was. It cost a stab of shame to acknowledge it, but somehow even that felt better away from the house.
At first they didn't talk at all, but the silence was comfortable. Kakuzu was good at not talking, after all. It helped, somehow, that they didn't have to look at each other directly. He could see Kakuzu watching him from the corner of his eye every now and then, but not as though he was about to say anything. He began, incrementally, to relax, and only then got a real picture of just how tense he'd been.
"It doesn't matter, you know," Kakuzu said finally, changing gear as he pulled onto the North Circular. "What they think. You were hallucinating when you made that statement. It's not going to be admitted as evidence. Just because a couple of jobsworths made it their business doesn't mean it's part of the investigation, I promise you."
"Maybe." Hidan sighed. "I don't know… Maybe what I said that day was more real anyway." He closed his eyes and leant back and they drove in silence for a while longer. Kakuzu headed out on the M1 through Edgeware and Watford towards the Chilterns. He didn't have much idea of where they'd end up, just that he needed to get Hidan away.
"Kakuzu," Hidan said with difficulty, once they'd fully left London behind. "He's going to get off, isn't he?"
"No!" Kakuzu insisted. "We don't have any reason to think that!"
Hidan shook his head. He started to speak, then hesitated, then started again. "I'm… I'm so fucking scared, Kakuzu. Not... right now. But... almost all the time! I just don't know how much more of this I can take!"
Kakuzu turned to look at his profile. We will keep pressing charges until something sticks!" he assured him. "What happened happened and there will be evidence of that somewhere."
"I hate feeling like this," Hidan whispered, looking down into the footwell. "I feel so fucking pathetic!"
Kakuzu looked at him for a moment. "Don't feel bad about it," he said gently, taking a hand from the wheel and reaching for Hidan's. "Nara-" He paused and looked back at the road. Could Hidan take talking about it this openly? But there was no point in not saying it. They both knew. Not saying it didn't make it go away. "Nara tried to kill you, Hidan," he said, as calmly as he could. "And very nearly managed. Of course you're scared. But you don't need to be. If he even comes nearyou again, I swear it'll be the last thing he ever does."
It was early evening by the time they drove back into Hampstead and in general Hidan felt a lot calmer. But as Kakuzu helped him out of the car he could immediately feel himself tensing up again. The air was getting chilly and he shivered slightly too - Kakuzu slipped his arms around him and held him close for a moment. "It's okay, love," he murmured. "You are safe here, I promise you. I'd fucking kill anyone who tried to touch you. So would the dogs."
"You can't be with me all the time…" Hidan whispered, flooding with shame as the words forced themselves out.
"Yes I can," Kakuzu claimed boldly. He got Hidan's crutch out of the footwell and put it into his hand. "I mean it. If that's what it takes to make you feel okay, then that's what I'll do."
Hidan leant his head against Kakuzu's chest and listened to his heart beating. He put his hand against it. It was strong and regular. And there was the ICD and pacemaker in there if it ever didn't. Although he was admittedly slightly less stacked than he had been, his recovery was the stuff of cardiologists' dreams. But… "I was supposed to look after you… " he said miserably. "Now I'm just a fucking ball and chain. How are you supposed to keep fit like you need to if you're babysitting me all the time?"
"Oh, love," Kakuzu sighed. "We'll find a way. We'll get through this, I promise."
Hidan shrugged and looked away. He didn't believe it and it wasn't what he wanted to hear anyway. Kakuzu was being perfect and considerate and as always now so tenderly gentle and he felt a painful stab of longing for how things used to be. He missed Kakuzu treating him as a physical equal. Now he treated him like he was made of glass and he hated it but at the same time there was no denying he warranted it. He was still so weak, and in so much pain if a fingertip so much as brushed him in the wrong place. It didn't happen as Kakuzu took his arm to support him the short distance along the pavement - Kakuzu was too careful for that - but he was so afraid of it that although he tried not to he couldn't help wincing away, hurting himself more in the process.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Kakuzu assured him patiently. "I know where to hold you…"
He should have said 'for heaven's sake, calm down you little idiot,' Hidan thought. He would've, two months ago. And for sure he deserved it. He missed Kakuzu feeling like he'd be able to lose his temper; missed desperately the feeling of them being absolutely emotionally free with each other. He even missed the occasional small oval bruise that used to often be on his wrist; imprint of Kakuzu's thumb in a too strong grip. He almost choked with tears then and there at the thought that there were some things that probably wouldn't happen again at all. Like that growl catching in Kakuzu's throat when he was really fucking annoyed - a sound that invariably made his stomach flip with excitement even in the most inappropriate of circumstances.
Kakuzu guided him - gently - through the gate into the front garden, and he thought with wretched longing of the way he used to manhandle him out of a room if he was making an exhibition of himself or picking a fight with someone - pushing him hard against a wall, first telling him exactly what he thought of the way he'd been behaving - inevitably ending up copping a feel at the very least, more likely kissing him til he could hardly stand straight. He missed getting a sharp slap on the ass when he was deliberately being an idiot for attention, another action that had generally ended up with a grope and a squeeze.
"What's wrong, love?" Kakuzu asked gently now, not even a trace of the irritation he must surely be feeling in his voice as he paused at the bottom of the steps to wipe away a traitorous escaping teardrop with his thumb.
"Nothing," Hidan muttered. He could see Kakuzu deliberately suppressing any negative reaction to this brush-off and hated himself for making him. So often now he noticed Kakuzu swallow his feelings down to comfort him, and he wished it could be the other way around. But he just didn't have the strength. He'd wanted so much to somehow make Kakuzu feel better about Tsuchi that first day back, but all he'd been able to do was pile all his own sorrow and regret on to him as well. And now as they made their slow and halting way up the steps and into the house he felt like it closed around him. He remembered with a stab of painful longing how he used to love this house. It had felt like an extension of Kakuzu himself. Now it felt like it was swallowing him whole.
Over the next few weeks they found some compromises. Sometimes Kisame or Suigetsu would come and stay with Hidan while Kakuzu went for a run or took the dogs up on the Heath. Sometimes - when Hidan was particularly anxious - Kisame or the vets walked the dogs for them and Kakuzu literally did not leave his side. And bit by bit Hidan started to make some noticeable physical progress and began to be able to move fairly freely on the level with just the stick and to attempt the stairs without Kakuzu's help, though it exhausted him. Still, though, there were places in the house he just wouldn't go. They stayed on in the spare room, despite it feeling to both of them like they were camping out and not really home, and Hidan continued to avoid the kitchen. Kakuzu had to bring him all his meals in the living room. And the very existence of the 2nd floor felt like having a mad wife in the attic.
Kakuzu went ahead and had the ground floor rooms fitted out into a combined living area and gym like he'd planned, so that Hidan could do his physio and get some gentle exercise without leaving the house. Perhaps, more than anything, he was hoping that a totally new space with no distressing connotations might help Hidan's state of mind. But unfortunately Hidan hated it - he hated the noise and disruption, and hated having workmen and specialist art movers about the place. He retreated to the upstairs living room and holed up there on the settee with Kaze and Kaminari draped protectively over him, running his rosary through his fingers but without enough energy to even really pray, and Kakuzu began to doubt whether he'd ever consent to go back downstairs at all.
Once the work was completed he did, though possibly only because Deidara finally came to stay. He'd had been out of hospital for a little over a month by then - his recovery had been much more straightforward than Hidan's - and no one was entirely happy about his staying longer with Zetsu. Konan would have taken him in - even Kisame had offered - but Deidara as always had had to do things his own way. With his squat destroyed he had no home to go to, or he would probably have tried to go straight back to living alone. Zetsu could be trusted to be at best vaguely attentive to him, and that suited Deidara's independent nature. Everyone else who cared about him had had to try and be content with the fact that he probably wouldn't let him die.
But now Zetsu was going out of the country for an exhibition. And with his court date in just one week's time, and Kakuzu representing to him with increasingly severity that he could be facing a lengthy prison term if he didn't take this seriously, he had agreed to spend the run up to it with them so that Kakuzu could help him prepare. To Kakuzu's immense relief, he'd also agreed to let him hire his own usual legal firm to represent him.
"Fuck!" he said when Kakuzu brought him up to the living room and he saw Hidan. "Man, you're fucked up , hm!"
Kakuzu froze. Surely Hidan's fragile mental state wouldn't support this. But this was Deidara, and it seemed he came with his own set of rules. "Yeah, man, you look like shit too," Hidan responded with alacrity, struggling to sit up a little, rather hindered by the dogs. "Why the fuck are you wearing glasses? And you sound like fucking Bob Dylan! Or Orochimaru..."
"Damaged my eyes in the explosion, didn't I, hm? And inhaled a shit-ton of smoke..." Deidara replied, whipping out a sketchbook. "Man, you have to let me draw you, hm. You look fucking... spiritual!
Hidan shrugged, but he was clearly pleased. "I've always been fucking spiritual, Dei," he said. "You know that…"
"Yeah but this is something else..." Deidara delved in his pocket and came out with some fragments of charcoal and a putty rubber, then sat down cross-legged on the floor and started drawing. "Don't move, hm," he said.
"Don't fucking worry, Dei," Hidan sighed, but without the bitterness that Kakuzu had become accustomed to. "I'm not going anywhere til Kakuzu makes me…"
"Don't move him Kakuzu," Deidara said, not looking anywhere but Hidan and his picture.
Kakuzu smiled. "He's all yours, Deidara," he assured him, heading for the door. "I'll put the kettle on, shall I? Do you want the dogs, Hidan, or shall I-?"
"Yes!" they said together. "They're in the picture now, hm," Deidara pointed out.
"They're keeping me warm, babe," Hidan told him with a sweeter smile than he'd had from him since they'd been back home.
"Kakuzu, do you have any charcoal in the house?" Deidara asked as he headed out of the door. "This is trashed…"
"Well, if you will keep it in your pockets…" Kakuzu chided him. "But yes, I'll bring some up." He was pretty certain he had some in his desk drawers. "Stay," he said to Kaminari, who'd started trying to struggle out of Hidan's arms and follow him. "Stay with Hidan."
When he came back with the tea, Mizu at his heels, Deidara was surrounded by sketches and Hidan was on the floor with him, looking at them. Kakuzu put the tray down on the coffee table and joined them. Dei grabbed the pack of charcoal off the tray and started intensifying the black on one where Hidan seemed to be melting into the dogs. "Don't get that on the rug, Deidara," Kakuzu said, without much hope. He positioned himself behind Hidan so that he could lean into him if he got tired and he did so immediately - a moment later all three dogs flopped against him too. Deidara glanced over, then started a new drawing of them and Kakuzu braced himself, laughing. "These four are going to have me over in a minute," he told him. "Draw fast!"
It was like the old days, if only for about a quarter of an hour. Deidara got charcoal everywhere, Hidan even let him do a study of his leg frame - the thing he hated most and would generally try not to acknowledge the existence of - and they both tried very hard to get Kakuzu to pose nude, which he resolutely refused to do. "Come to our room tomorrow morning, Dei," Hidan told him, grinning wickedly. "You can catch him then!"
"I want to take the dogs out at 6!" Kakuzu warned them. "You'll have to get up early…" A house guest to stay with Hidan was too good an opportunity to waste - the thought of an early morning of solitude on the Heath was irresistible.
But soon Deidara was suffering with the dry eyes and headaches that his ordeal had left him prey to; they were both coughing with exertion; and Kakuzu thought he'd better make them rest for a while. And after he'd administered Deidara's eye drops for him because he kept missing or blinking when he tried to do it himself, and found him his inhaler, and given Hidan his various medications and tucked him back up on the couch and taken Deidara upstairs to lie down in the darkened second spare bedroom, he was beginning to think with some trepidation about how he was going to manage to care for two fractious invalids if Deidara took up their invitation to stay long term. And an hour alone on the Heath began to feel like a distant fantasy. But he went downstairs to cook supper and tried not to think negatively. He hoped at least that Hidan might eat a little more than usual with Deidara there to encourage him.
Over the next week Hidan oscillated between being so excited and fired up about his rehabilitation that he overdid everything, and then getting cast down and impatient when he couldn't keep it up. Deidara was, if anything, even more touchy and unpredictable than ever - he was a ball of mental energy that his damaged body couldn't quite keep pace with. He made absolutely no concession to Hidan's fragile state - which Hidan seemed to enjoy at first, but couldn't cope with indefinitely. Dei would regularly push him well beyond his limits, and needle and tease him until he was on the edge of breaking down. Hidan did the same in return; he'd taken to singing 'Smoke Gets in your Eyes' every time Deidara needed to use his eye drops, and imitating his extra gravelly tones until he made his own voice hoarse. He wasn't above teasing Dei about blowing up an entire building just to get rid of Tobi either… but luckily Deidara viewed the explosion as a transcendental experience and was actually more than happy to talk about it. In fact they both spent a lot of time talking about their near-death experiences in terms that had Kakuzu wondering about their sanity.
They bickered and wound each other up, and it certainly wasn't the charming mutually supportive dual convalescence that Kakuzu had imagined while Hidan was in the ICU. But at least Hidan wasn't bored. And there was no doubt that being drawn every day was helping him come to terms with his physical state and rebuilding his shattered self-esteem a little - Kakuzu had to give Deidara that. He even started drawing a bit himself, which interested Kakuzu a lot - strange moody abstracts and attempts to recreate his glimpse of the face of Jashin. And perhaps he was also becoming a little more emotionally robust. At any rate, he was less irritated by Kakuzu's kid-glove handling while he had Deidara there to be a bracing contrast.
Kakuzu didn't share his fears about the court case with Hidan because he didn't want to give him another source of worry, but he wasn't feeling optimistic about Deidara's legal situation. Bringing in his own lawyers at the 11th hour, they were able to throw a halfway decent defence together, but Deidara was determined to plead guilty and he was fairly certain he wasn't going to show enough remorse to satisfy the most liberal of judges. All he could hope for was that the severity of his own injuries and the fact that no-one had been killed - as well as the traumatic brain injury he'd sustained only a few months before - might have some mitigating effect. But he'd heard that Sasuke Uchiha and a member of the Suna clan - Gaara's older brother - were witnesses for the prosecution, and the fact was that Deidara almost certainly had been behaving with wanton disregard for life and property and intent to cause damage.
Kakuzu went with him on the day, and in the end, and after hearing the evidence, a four month custodial sentence felt like they'd got off lightly. The judge talked about needing to send a message of 'deterrence and denunciation'; and Deidara was very lucky that Tobi had been seen by interpol crossing a border a few days previously (although he had managed to avoid being detained), so the non-lethality of the explosion was beyond doubt. But Kakuzu was very uncomfortable about the fact that the jail term was effective immediately. He had expected it to be deferred by at least a month on the basis of the medical advice the court had heard. He didn't feel Deidara was well enough, and he knew what a terrible effect this would have on Hidan, but Deidara's own instinct for independence was against him. He was devastated for them both; the sight of Deidara's slight upright figure being led off to the court cells between two burly police officers was appalling.
So was returning to Hampstead alone. Despite his assurances to Hidan that they would immediately organise an appeal - with proper lawyers from the start this time - and that Deidara would be in a very low security prison; that they could visit him and call him; and that it was really a very short sentence that he might not even have to serve all of, he was just as shocked and angry and miserable as Kakuzu expected.
To add to that, they were hearing nothing positive from the police about the investigation into Hidan's attack, and as the autumn progressed and the case against Shikamaru didn't, things took a definite downturn. Hidan's recovery seemed to plateau. He was still so thin and easily tired, and he started to get ill a lot even though he barely left the house. Every time he got a cold it seemed to go to his chest, and twice during September and October he had to be readmitted to hospital - once for a final adjustment to his leg frame, and once for a bad chest infection. Each time it took him weeks to recover from the mental impact of being back there. As well as that he was still in constant low level pain from the spleen injury - that was to be expected for at least another month or two, and would have been less of a problem if he wasn't so resistant to taking anything for it.
Another problem was that they didn't seem to be able to resume any more intimacy than just kissing and holding each other. Kakuzu had assumed things would just progress naturally from there, but they didn't. Hidan simply seemed to be in too much discomfort to really get aroused. Quite apart from pain, he hated the encumbrance of the leg frame and feeling so weak - and despite Kakuzu's constant reassurances, the state of his own body still disgusted him - even more so when he thought of it in a sexual context. And he was very very unused to his body not doing what he wanted. When he didn't get hard immediately he'd give up in tears and there was no coming back from that.
It began to hang over them both, and Kakuzu started to feel that things had been easier between them even in the hospital. There, at least, they'd had no expectations. Every stolen moment alone together had felt triumphant. Now every morning he'd wake up hard, and if he woke Hidan with kisses and tried to start something, Hidan wouldn't be able to respond and would end up feeling useless and discouraged. If he got up and sorted himself out in the bathroom, Hidan would wake up alone, seeming to sense in his sleep that he was gone, and feel abandoned and miserable.
Each attempt, no matter how gentle and careful Kakuzu was, seemed to go the same way. As soon as he tried to touch him, he'd tense up - from shame that he wasn't hard and fear that he'd be hurt. The shame was compounded by his inability to embrace the pain he was experiencing in the way he thought he ought to be able to, and then guilt and Jashin were brought into the picture as well.
It was undeniable as well that a big feature of their sex life previously had been a certain roughness - that Hidan had loved being manhandled; had loved attempts to control him that he could fight back against. They simply couldn't do that now. Kakuzu couldn't grab him, couldn't push him against a wall or throw him onto a bed. More fundamentally, he couldn't take any pleasure in ideas of subjugating him or subduing him anymore. He only wanted him to feel alright again. But Hidan couldn't feel alright, with or without it.
At least, Kakuzu thought wearily as Hidan once again sobbed with shame and disappointment against his chest after yet another failure, at least they could still have this much. He could have him so close. He was as frustrated as he'd ever been, but it would have been enough for him if Hidan could have been content. He held him as tightly as he dared and stroked him in the safe places - the back of his head, his right side. "It doesn't matter, love," he told him, for what felt like the thousandth time.
"It does!" Hidan gasped ragefully. "How can you fucking say it doesn't matter?! It matters to me!"
Kakuzu suppressed a sigh. Why did Hidan always have to twist his meaning like this? There was no point trying to explain that he hadn't meant it like that - Hidan knew it anyway. He just wanted something to be angry about. "If you'd just relax and let me try to-" he began, knowing there was probably no point in that either, and indeed, Hidan shook his head vociferously. He wouldn't let Kakuzu try anything. He pressed the point - just a little. "We don't need to have any expectations of anything. I'm sure I could-"
Hidan raised his tear-stained face to Kakuzu's. "You know what?" he sneered savagely. "Why don't you just make me?"
"What?!" Kakuzu was shocked into taking the bait before he thought about it.
"Just fucking do it, Kakuzu!" Hidan snarled. "Just fucking pin me down and lube me up and fuck me! Don't fucking listen when I tell you to stop! Then you'll be happy at least!"
"Stop it, Hidan!" Kakuzu commanded with a lot more force than he meant to. "Where the hell is this coming from?!"
"It would get the job done," Hidan muttered bitterly, a little subdued by Kakuzu's anger, but also looking up at him with a kind of triumph. "Once we've done it once-"
"You'd never want me to touch you again." Kakuzu told him flatly. "Don't say things like that!"
Then of course Hidan struggled away from him, and after what he'd said he couldn't even try to hold on to him. He could see that he was desperate and miserable, but he was at a loss for how to help him.
Hidan was sorry the next day, and sweeter for a while, and he had a few good days when he was able to make some progress physically, but things were very up and down. He didn't recognise his own limits, and good days were frequently followed by days when he was so fatigued he could barely stand up. Kakuzu resorted to trying to conceal just how much he wanted him just to try and reduce the pressure he was putting on himself, but of course that wasn't great for his self esteem. He did his best to counteract it. He had his favourites of Deidara's sketches framed up, and hung them in all the rooms that Hidan frequented, and he told him constantly that he was beautiful and he loved him and it worked, a little. But as the weather became colder and darker the downs began to outweigh the ups.
It started to be hard to even get him out of bed in the morning; Kakuzu had to chivvy him to do his physio, to eat anything. He tried everything he could think of to amuse him, but the fact was that Hidan needed to be doing to be happy, and he couldn't do anything for very long. And he needed company - other company than Kakuzu - but when he had it he was tense and uncomfortable. Despite the bitter things he sometimes said, he did trust Kakuzu - trusted him to love him no matter what he said or did or looked like - and he didn't trust anyone else like that. Still, they tried. Yugito came a few times, and even brought her stylist along to cut Hidan's hair for him and sent him outfits that he could fit on over the leg frame - but Hidan had never liked that stylist, and Yugito found it hard to hide her dismay at his altered appearance. Karin came by quite often in the evenings to discuss business things with Kakuzu, and sometimes stayed for dinner - but she and Hidan had never had a great deal in common and she reminded him too much of the night of the party. Despite his ongoing feud with Kisame, Killer Bee had not forgotten his fondness for Hidan, and he came and rapped at him for a quarter of an hour before he started crying and told Kakuzu he'd kill himself if he had to listen to any more.
With Deidara out of the picture and Konan and Zetsu away, Suigetsu and Kisame - with an occasional side of Kimimaro and Jugo - were the only people Kakuzu felt happy to leave Hidan with. The people who really knew what they'd been through during the weeks in hospital. And even then, he didn't want Kakuzu to be away from him long. Kakuzu tried to interest him in going to concerts or the cinema; tried to get him to come out with the dogs with him, just on short walks - he could put some weight on his injured leg now, and it would have been good for him to build up his stamina - but Hidan absolutely couldn't face going into any public place at all. He couldn't focus on television, couldn't even listen to music unless they were in the car. He played mindless iphone games for a couple of minutes at a time at most, and stared out of the window.
So Kakuzu made sure to take him out in the car every day. The antiemetics he was still taking had the happy side effect of getting rid of his propensity towards motion sickness too, and those long drives began to be all that was keeping both of them sane. Hidan seemed to be able to talk without acrimony when they were moving, and if they got far enough from London he sometimes even consented to get out of the car for a while. It was like being removed from the reality of their daily life, and Kakuzu began to think seriously that a complete removal wouldn't be a bad idea at all.
One horrible rainy afternoon when Kakuzu was downstairs in the kitchen and the dogs had all run down too to see if he was going to feed them, Hidan found one of his old stashes of scalpel blades in the bathroom. He'd had no urge to do a ritual since the accident, and he didn't now really, but he did wonder vaguely what it would feel like. He sat down on the lid of the toilet and got one of the blades out of the packet. "Do you want me to, Jashin?" he murmured flatly, but Jashin gave him no sign. He pressed the point of it against his arm, just in the crook of his elbow where the IV had gone in for so long - there was still a scar. He didn't do anything, but a bead of blood appeared and he realised his hand was shaking. Suddenly he felt sick and let the blade tumble out of his fingers onto the floor. He leant forward, resting his head on his knees. He'd had enough of pain. Was that a sin? He'd never had to consider it before but it surely was. Every day he tried to deal with the pain by dedicating it to Jashin, but still he didn't recover. So maybe this was what Jashin wanted for him now.
Or maybe he wasn't recovering because he wasn't doing rituals anymore, a voice in his head piped up. But then, if Jashin wasn't calling him… He'd never had to doubt his communion with Jashin before, but now he didn't know - he just didn't know. He got another blade out of the packet and looked at it. He could feel the constant twingeing ache in his right leg, and the soreness deep in his left side, and the tight pain in his chest when he breathed in deeply, all clamouring and fighting to be heard; to be the main one, to overwhelm him. He could imagine the sharp pain of the blade slicing in, cutting through them, muting them for a bit, and it was tempting. It was definitely tempting.
But then he thought about having one more aching, niggling pain to deal with after the sharp slice was done, and that was not so tempting. And it was not Jashinism, either, dulling one pain with another. He might not know how to worship anymore, but it wasn't that way. He tucked the blade in his hand back in the packet and tried to stop tensing against the pain. It's not stronger than you, he told himself, just like he'd told Dei at Sasori's funeral - but it was hard. He tried to take a deep breath to help himself relax, and just ended up coughing. Then his chest hurt more and he tensed up again.
He heard Kakuzu's tread on the stairs, and shoved the packet hastily into his pocket. He knew how Kakuzu would feel about this. Then he remembered the blade on the floor and fumbled to pick it up. It skidded away from him on the polished boards. He slid onto his hands and knees and scrabbled for it desperately - Kakuzu was nearly on the landing now and he did not want to have to explain this - and finally got a grip on the wrong end and accidentally sliced his fingertip open.
"Fuck," he whimpered. Blood ran around his finger like a bright ring and dripped, then splattered, onto the floor. He started not to be very aware of his surroundings, but he heard Kakuzu say his name, and his footsteps speeding up. The pain was sharp then dull, sharp then dull. His finger throbbed and all the other pains asserted themselves on every off-beat. Black dots started to circle in from the edges of his vision and he started to be very glad he was already on the floor. He sensed rather than saw the door opening and Kakuzu was suddenly beside him, his face questioning, his eyes widening as he took in what Hidan had done. Hidan felt a cold sweat prickle out all over him. "It was an accident," he pleaded, holding it out to him, watching the blood run back down over his hand and wrist and just wanting it all to stop.
Kakuzu's first thought was that he'd need to put a couple of stitches in. He didn't want to mess around. He could see it would keep opening up again if he didn't, or Hidan would make it open up. "What were you doing?" he asked wearily, wrapping Hidan up in a towel because he seemed so shaky. He sat him on the edge of the bath and made him hold it under the cold tap, making a folded pad out of another towel for him to rest his head on on the side of the sink.
"Just looking at them," Hidan said in a small voice. "I wanted to know… if I wanted to. If Jashin wanted me to."
"And did he? Did you?" Kakuzu got his kit out of the bathroom cabinet, glancing round uneasily at Hidan in case he fainted and fell off the bath.
Hidan shook his head. "He didn't say anything." His voice cracked. "He hasn't called me at all since it happened." He tried to take a deep breath and coughed. "And I- I kind of wanted to do it but also I didn't want to have done it. I wanted to feel it, but I just didn't want it to - to keep hurting." He stifled a sob. "It's so fucking lame! What kind of Jashinist am I? It's fucking blasphemy, what I thought!" Another choking back of tears. "And then I was just trying to pick the blade up off the floor and that happened."
He gave a hiss of pain as Kakuzu took hold of his hand and dried it off. That didn't bode very well for suturing and he briefly considered a digital nerve block - but he knew he'd be quick and he felt like the first priority was to get the job done and the thing bandaged up and out of sight. He wrapped it in a sterile dressing and put some pressure on to stop the bleeding as much as possible before he got to work on it. Hidan groaned and hid his face in the towel. "So maybe Jashin did want it then," his voice came, muffled. "He takes what he wants. Maybe he was calling me but I couldn't hear..."
The idea was clearly starting to panic him - he was well on his way down the rabbit hole. Kakuzu took a firm hold on his shoulder. "I don't think so," he said, giving it a squeeze. "Maybe you… maybe you've suffered enough for him, Hidan. Have you considered that maybe he doesn't need any more pain from you?"
Hidan moaned into the towel and wordlessly shook his head. And Kakuzu found himself very unwilling to put him through anything else after that. In fact, he just couldn't.
"Well maybe you should," he said. He put the length of suture back in his first aid kit and got out the steri strips and superglue instead. The cut wasn't quite as deep as he'd thought from the amount of blood on the floor. He could make this work. "I remember what you said, about the wings of pain, and him lifting you and... letting you slip back down. I think you've... transcended all of this. You're in a ... state of grace. Or something. You just need to get better now."
"So why am I not getting better?" Hidan wailed.
Kakuzu sighed. "You are, you just don't see it." He dried the finger as thoroughly as possible, then squeezed the cut shut and applied a layer of superglue over the top. A tiny drop of blood escaped and hissed away as it reacted with the glue - he increased the pressure a little. "You wouldn't remember but for weeks you couldn't even lift your hand off the bed. You've come a long way, believe me."
But Hidan still didn't really respond. Kakuzu glued steri strips across the cut, then bandaged it tightly to prevent it gaping open under the surface. He was pretty pleased with his handiwork - perhaps stitches would have been excessive after all. Hidan didn't seem particularly appreciative though. He didn't even lift his head, and let his hand droop back into the sink so that Kakuzu felt the need to put a towel under it so the dressing didn't get wet.
He wiped the blood off the floor, then led him - still not very responsive - back to the living room and gave him his lunch. He'd prepared it with a great deal of care, but Hidan just picked at it, and then started not very discreetly feeding most of it to Kaze. Kakuzu stood watching him, at a loss. He'd tried everything he could think of to tempt Hidan's appetite, and nothing worked. He knew it wasn't his fault, but he couldn't help feeling a stab of disappointment.
"What?!" Hidan said defensively, catching his eye.
"You'd get better a lot faster if you would at least try to eat," he said before he'd thought it through.
Mild as it was, it was more criticism than Hidan could take. Without missing a beat he hurled the plate across the room, and it would've gone straight through the original Georgian glass if Kakuzu hadn't caught it. As it was, it broke in his hand, and then he was bleeding too.
They stared at each other a moment, both shocked into silence. Then Hidan burst into tears.
It was a moment of clarity for Kakuzu. They had to make a change. They had to stop pretending that life was going to go back to normal. Then and there, even as he picked up the shards of ceramic and got blood all over Hidan as he tried to comfort him, he made the final decision to take early retirement from his position at the bank. Despite the offer of a sabbatical for as long as he liked, he realised he really had no interest in going back at all. It wasn't as though they needed the money, and it was so manifestly clear that there was no way he could go back and take care of Hidan the way he needed to be taken care of.
So once he'd cleaned himself up and steri-stripped and bandaged up his own hand - luckily it was just surface lacerations - he bundled Hidan into the car and took him out of the city, and once they'd been driving for long enough that he was somewhere near calm again he made the suggestion that maybe they should leave London for a while. Get a house in some smaller town; take some time away from the pressure to get back to how they used to be. Hidan wasn't sure, but then he wasn't sure about anything now. He said maybe, and that was enough for Kakuzu to get straight on the phone to his agent and ask him to look out for somewhere.
It was only a few days after that that they had another visit from the police, and the confirmation of what Kakuzu had begun to suspect - they were dropping the case. They could press charges for the assault in the hospital, they were told, but as Hidan had been unhurt and had also said definitively to a nurse that Shikamaru wouldn't even be able to hurt him, it wasn't going to result in much. As for the 'accident' as they now called it, they had no evidence of anyone else being involved. There was no case against Shikamaru.
When Kakuzu asked them furiously how on earth Hidan had ended up under a pile of garbage in a public toilet with life-threatening injuries then, they suggested that it had either been a hit and run - which they were still investigating though there was no CCTV on that area of the road unfortunately, due to a large tree blocking the nearest camera - or a collision with a parked vehicle, and that Hidan, dazed from such an accident, fell down the steps after getting off the road. Or that in his sleep deprived state he'd cycled off the pavement and hit the railings, then gone over.
Kakuzu lost his rag at that last one. "That's ridiculous!" he growled. "His injuries weren't consistent with that at all! He'd probably have died then and there!"
"Please try to stay calm, Mr Taki," the insultingly young policeman said, fingering his badge and clearly barely listening to him.
"Kabuto Yakushi gave you a statement saying that Hidan's injuries were entirely consistent with his version of events!" he insisted, trying to sound calm and failing utterly. "And it was not an easy set of injuries to explain! We were mystified until he told us he'd been tripped at the top of the steps."
Both police officers were trying to interrupt him now but he went doggedly on. "I know for a fact that Kim Kaguya, an internationally recognised expert in orthopaedic trauma if you weren't aware of that, told your colleagues that a tibia fibula fracture like Hidan's couldn't possibly have been caused by landing on it - as he would have falling from a height - or twisting it, like you might expect in an ordinary tumble. It was clearly a hard impact against a hard edge, from about the height of Hidan himself. Only falling in the way he described it adequately explains it!"
But whatever he said, it didn't change their minds - and anyway, theirs weren't the minds that needed changing - it was the prosecution service that had decided not to press charges. These were just the wretched messengers. Though it didn't stop them laying out their toxic opinions - telling Hidan that they didn't believe dooring someone on purpose was possible, and that they put it down to him hallucinating the night's events as he lay injured.
Hidan made no reply. It didn't seem like there was any point at all. He just sat there as Kakuzu fought for him, feeling lightheaded and nauseous. He wished he'd stop, wished they'd all stop talking about him. He didn't want to think about it any more. Couldn't think about it any more. But he couldn't stop either. It was taking all the energy he had not to give in to the flashbacks he knew were waiting for him if he relaxed for a second. Without a word he got up and walked to the door.
Kakuzu was in the middle of interrogating the police about the appeal process so he had about a second's head start, but he followed him of course - he heard him abruptly excusing himself even as the door closed behind him - and caught up with him on the landing before he'd even reached the stairs.
"Hidan, love, are you alright?" he asked, his voice low, hand still on the door knob.
"What do you think?" Hidan didn't trouble to lower his voice or even try to keep the bitterness he was feeling out of it.
"Sweetheart, we can still appeal," Kakuzu said, crossing the landing towards him. "And the investigation isn't over. They are still looking for the car which could mean-"
"Oh just fucking drop it Kakuzu!" he snarled, cutting him off.
"What do you mean?" Kakuzu looked at him with that frown of concern he knew so well, and, fuck, it made him mad right now.
"It wouldn't make any difference, would it? Even if he got a fucking life sentence it wouldn't help me! I'd still be utterly fucked up," he spat bitterly at him. "Why do you even care so much?!"
Kakuzu was speechless for a moment, but only a moment. "Because I'm fucking angry and I want him to be punished for what he's done to you!" he shot back at him, surprised out of his careful gentleness. "What the hell do you think?"
It thrilled Hidan and upset him simultaneously. It had been a long time since Kakuzu had spoken to him like that and somehow it opened the floodgates of his own frustrations. "Because he ruined your pretty boyfriend for you, huh?" he jeered. "Because now you're stuck with a fucking broken headcase to look after for the rest of your life?"
"Hidan..." Kakuzu reached out to hold him but he flung his hands off him.
"Leave me alone!" he wailed, stumbling backwards away from Kakuzu and hating himself, and everyone, and most of all this broken body that wouldn't let him stop remembering what had happened for a single second. "None of this fucking matters. None of it will help!"
"I do think it matters," Kakuzu said gently. "I really think you'd feel-" he paused, "-more secure if-"
"More secure!" Hidan mocked. "You mean less scared!" he accused him, knowing he was being poisonous and unfair but not able to stop himself. He was physically trembling with the effort and adrenaline of trying to force Kakuzu to fight with him but started to climb the stairs anyway, putting too much weight on the bad leg almost immediately.
Kakuzu moved forward to try and help him. "That's not what I mean-"
"Stop being so fucking calm!" Hidan screamed at him, finally losing it completely and lashing out at him so that he instinctively stepped backwards. "I don't want help! Don't touch me. Stop following me! Just leave me alone!"
The look on Kakuzu's face nearly broke his heart, but he made himself turn away from him and forced his protesting body to carry on climbing. He heard Kakuzu go back into the living room and guessed that he wanted to get rid of their unwelcome company before coming after him. Maybe he also recognised that there was nothing he could do for him right now.
His mind soon went blank with pain and he wasn't really fully aware of what he was doing - or how he was doing it - until he was heaving himself up the last few steps and stumbling into the bedroom. Their real bedroom, right at the top of the house, not the spare room. In his spaced out state he'd dragged himself right past it. He felt a strange kind of numb calm now, but utterly exhausted, ashamed and miserable. He wanted to just cast himself down on the bed, but one under-recognised problem with being so fucking broken was that you couldn't just cast yourself anywhere - you had to ease yourself down gently, sticking your stupid fucking broken leg out at a dumb angle and making sure you didn't put any undue pressure on the internal injury that everyone says will take six months to heal, but which you in fact know will hurt for the rest of your fucking life. Oh, and you can't use your shitted up right arm to do any of the easing, either. No, it has to be your dumb as fuck left arm to do all that, and it's just as fucking likely to throw you down right onto your spleen - an organ you'd never given any consideration to in your entire life before - as it is to lower you down gently.
Lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, having managed to catch his leg frame on the corner of the bed and now dealing with throbbing pain from all of the pin sites as well, he gave himself a moment to wallow in self pity. He judged that he had maybe thirty seconds before Kakuzu caught up with him, given that he'd probably take the stairs two at a time once he'd shown the police officers out. Kakuzu was so dedicated to his cardiac rehab that his consultant wanted to make a case study of him. A little sob caught in his throat at the unfairness of it all. He'd thought that willpower would be enough to get his strength back. But what did you do when strength just wouldn't come no matter how hard you tried? What did you do when you didn't have the energy to get up and try any more, and when you tried to push yourself through that you were actually fucking bedbound the next day. And when every time you thought you were getting somewhere you got another fucking infection? And then another, and another.
Somehow he rolled himself over - hurting his spleen in the process - so that he could bury his face in a pillow and scream his frustration into it. In seconds the pillowcase was wet with tears, and he wasn't even meaning to cry. He hated it, hated the pathetic weakness of it. It made him feel so drained as well - it was like all the strength he didn't even have was leaking out of his eyes.
He could hear Kakuzu's tread on the stairs now and with a huge effort managed to stem the flow and stop his body shaking. It was only possible with a massive amount of tension and he pretty much had to stop breathing. He knew that one deep breath would completely break him down again.
"Hidan…?" his voice came from the doorway. It was so gentle and so full of concern that he could hardly bear it after all the shit he'd said - and done. Kakuzu wasn't blaming him, wasn't angry with him. Both of which he felt he deserved. He didn't trust himself to say anything and after a beat of silence he could hear Kakuzu crossing the floor towards him. Then a firm hand was rubbing his back. "They've gone, love," he told him.
Hidan still couldn't speak, but he groped for Kakuzu's other hand where it rested on the bed beside him and held it tightly. It was the nearest thing to making an apology that he could manage to do. Kakuzu returned the pressure and he knew he was forgiven. If you could be forgiven when someone didn't blame you anyway.
Kakuzu carried on talking to him, still calm and gentle, and it didn't make him angry anymore. Sensibly he was avoiding the subject of the prosecution, but being Kakuzu managed to strike right at the heart of the matter anyway. "Hidan, I know it's hard to believe it now, but in a years' time you'll hardly be able to believe how you felt now," he told him. "You are going to get there."
"A year?!" Hidan felt the tears well up again. If that was meant to be comforting it certainly missed the mark. He didn't feel like he could bear even one more day of this.
"I know, love..." Kakuzu extricated his hand, then expertly used the bedspread to slide him further up the bed and flip him over. "But I want you to be realistic and stop beating yourself up. You don't have to do it all at once."
He wiped away the tears Hidan still couldn't stop as they rolled down his cheeks. "Look at this!" he said in mock indignation, holding up a dripping hand. "We're going to have to find a way to cheer you up or you're going to get yourself all dehydrated!" He lay down beside him and somehow manoeuvred himself, snaking an arm underneath him, so that Hidan's head was nestled into the crook of his shoulder. The way they always used to lie together. And that did make things feel a little better. Even the room didn't feel as charged with horrific memories as he'd thought it would.
Kakuzu bent his head down and started to kiss away the rest of the tears, which weren't flowing quite so fast now anyway. "Mm, salty..." he murmured. "Why does everything that comes out of you taste so nice…?" Hidan could feel a stirring against his thigh where Kakuzu was pressed against up him. He didn't understand how on earth Kakuzu could find him sexy in this state, but it was certainly reassuring that he did. That he always did. He just wished his own body was capable of registering anything but discomfort and pain right now.
Kakuzu laid a hand on his chest. He managed not to flinch away, but it made his heart beat harder and not in a good way. "I know this is hard," Kakuzu said. "Is it... okay if I try to touch you? I know where you're hurt. I won't go there, I promise."
"I want you to," Hidan admitted tiredly. He didn't have the energy for any more antagonism. "I really want you to, but everything feels so wrong…"
"Maybe I can make it feel right again." Kakuzu's fingertips traced across his nipple through his t-shirt, making him feel seriously jittery. "You're just out of touch with your body; I'm sure you dissociated when you were so ill, when there was nothing to feel but pain. But now, you can feel good again. It's okay to open up to it."
Dissociating. That brought an awful memory up to the surface. "Yeah, I think you're right," he muttered quickly, trying to suppress it back down, but suddenly it burst into words despite his efforts. "I … I thought I was being raped," he told him wretchedly.
"What?" Kakuzu's hand - under his t-shirt now - stopped moving.
"In the ICU. I guess they were intubating me but I was hallucinating and I thought - I thought I was being face-fucked by- I don't even know who by-"
Kakuzu's face was agonised. Hidan felt his hand clench. " Not you!" he reassured him. He almost regretted telling him because he so desperately wanted him to keep on touching him. He wanted this to happen. Why was he sabotaging this moment? But, somehow, he had to tell him. Had to say it out loud to make sense of it.
"The worst thing was, though, you were just standing there," he told him, and Kakuzu's hand relaxed back against him but didn't resume stroking him. He wanted him to so badly, though it scared him too. "I didn't…" He felt so choked with shame he could hardly go on. He wanted to hide his face from Kakuzu's anguished gaze, but forced himself to keep looking him in the eye. "I couldn't understand why you were just letting it happen… And that's when I decided there was no point in being with my body anymore..."
"Oh love…" Kakuzu's voice cracked. "I think I know when that was. You kept mouthing at me, make it stop ..." For a moment it looked like he was fighting back tears. "You hated the ventilator so much. But you were so sick… there was nothing else that could have helped you."
"I know…" Hidan said quietly. "I was so fucked up…"
"I never let myself think I was going to lose you," Kakuzu said after a moment. "But that day... that's... when it would've happened. They told me it was 50:50, whether you'd- I still don't know why they told me that. It didn't help! But they did, and that - that was... really the worst… the lowest point..."
He looked so broken that Hidan was somehow galvanised. Maybe he wasn't so helpless, not if he could make Kakuzu look like that. Lightly he traced his fingertips over the faint bump of the pacemaker - only visible through his shirt because he knew it was there, and because he knew Kakuzu's body so intimately that any line out of place drew his eye. He let himself imagine for a moment how this would be if he was the one who was okay. If Kakuzu needed him; could depend on him like he depended on Kakuzu. He wished - again - that he could make him okay now, but he was still looking past him, caught for a moment in those painful memories. But it reminded Hidan somehow of the day of Sasori's funeral. And he'd managed it then.
"Hey," he said softly after another moment of Kakuzu's hand not moving. "You're going to lose your boner if you keep thinking like that…"
Kakuzu's eyes met his, and seemed to light up. He was back in the moment in a heartbeat. "Oh, you like that, do you?" He pushed against Hidan's thigh a little harder, and started up his stroking again, caressing and teasing him. He was right, he did know where to touch him. Almost unbelievably, Hidan found himself relaxing, trusting him, some kind of sense of himself flooding back. Then it was floating away, along with all the thoughts and doubts and fears until only sensation was left, his body feeling in a way it hadn't for weeks, months. And the need to be touching Kakuzu in return grew and grew until he couldn't resist it any longer and his left hand was fumbling at Kakuzu's fly, managed to release it - he was quite ambidextrous by now - and finally had Kakuzu's cock in his hand.
Kakuzu groaned aloud - he was clearly more than ready for this. His own hand found Hidan's and Hidan was thrusting into it without any thought for his injured spleen and mending ribs. "Easy, love," Kakuzu cautioned breathlessly, but Hidan was beyond listening. "Oh my god," he gasped. "Oh my fucking god, yes, yes!"
"I'm sorry baby," Kakuzu smiled, moments later. "I came all over you… Actually we both came all over you…"
Hidan giggled, rubbing his face against Kakuzu's chest. "Well, I like it like that…" he smirked. He could hardly believe how much better he felt.
"Are you alright, love?" Kakuzu asked solicitously once he had his breath back. "I... didn't expect we'd get that far..."
Hidan giggled. "You fucking opened the floodgates now!"
"Mm," Kakuzu acknowledged, sliding his hand up Hidan's abdomen, spreading slickness across his chest, circling his fingertips in it. "You do have form for this kind of thing, I suppose..."
"Ah, fuck...!" Hidan moaned again as Kakuzu kept on, mixing their cum together, lightly tracing across his left side now. "Fuck!" His whole body was tingling, he felt lit up. It was nerve-wracking, but bearable now.
Kakuzu lifted his wet hand and considered it. "That's better..." he said. "That's what I like to see coming out of you..." He brushed it over Hidan's cheek, trailing his forefinger over his bottom lip. Hidan flicked out his tongue to meet it. The combined taste of them reminded him so sharply of just how long it had been since they'd been properly intimate. So much lost time between them. The last time they'd fucked... well, they hadn't. It was that time on the living room floor, the day of the party. It seemed so cruel that that was all they'd both had to look back on all this time. And even the time before that he remembered Kakuzu seeming a bit disengaged, too. They'd been really fucking things up, even before life decided to fuck things up for them.
But now Kakuzu was anything but disengaged - utterly in the moment. Licking their cum off his fingers while looking intensely into his eyes, then his hand back on his cheek; kissing him, mouth open, tongue against his own - and Hidan felt that as long as this could carry on he'd be okay, he was safe, contained; he could be happy. Neither of them were hard anymore, of course, and he kind of liked that. This wasn't ramping up to anything, but just what they wanted to do, just to be that close.
"Isn't it nice that we can do this in the middle of the day?" Kakuzu asked, pulling back to look at him. He looked so fucking hot, a little smile playing around the corners of his mouth, eyes half closed against the sun that was slanting through the windows now.
"...yeah..." Hidan sighed. "Pity we both had to get absolutely fucked to achieve it though."
"Well—" Kakuzu began.
"Are you about to make a joke about me getting absolutely fucked anyway...?"
"Yes," Kakuzu admitted. "I know it's in poor taste but it's irresistible. Just like you..." He lowered his head to kiss him again, sticky hand venturing into his hair. "Is that okay...?" he murmured against his lips. "I just like making a mess of you, I can't help myself…"
"Aren't I enough of a mess already...?" Hidan asked, but he was only fishing for more sympathy and reassurance. The thought of Kakuzu deliberately getting cum in his hair was making his stomach swoop with excitement.
Once Kakuzu would have given him a metaphorical if not a physical slapping for such a shameless move, but now, "you're perfect," he purred, starting to kiss him again. And it felt okay now. It felt right. "Doesn't Jashin have some rule against being this perfect? Doesn't he get jealous, like Allah's supposed to…?"
Hidan smiled into the kiss that Kakuzu immediately resumed. He loved hearing him talking about Jashin, even if he was bordering on blasphemy a lot of the time. "No," he said, when Kakuzu next gave him the opportunity. "That's a dumb as fuck rule. And I don't think that's really what Allah-"
"Enough theology." Kakuzu's mouth was on his again. "You're perfect and I'm going to make you feel perfect again if it fucking kills me."
They stayed in bed for the rest of the afternoon, falling asleep in the sunlight and waking slightly glued together with cum. And it was a genuine step forward, but at the same time it was not as simple as that. The impact of the prosecution service dropping the case was still enormous. Without constant buoying up Hidan was still in danger of slipping back into depression and paranoia that was always lurking beneath the surface. And personally, Kakuzu felt the paranoia was justified. More and more, he didn't feel that Hidan was safe in London. There was no way he'd let him go out alone even if he'd wanted to. Nara had got away with this scot-free for now, but leaving Hidan alive hadn't been part of his plan even if he hadn't had the guts to actually finish the job. There was no guarantee that he wouldn't try again.