Heart pounding, he picked his way over the rubble to an internal door that leant outwards at a drunken angle, half wrenched off its hinges. Edging past it, he entered a dim room, still bizarrely lit by a flickering strip light. Must have emergency batteries, he thought irrelevantly. There was an examination table in the centre of the room, trays of instruments laid out beside it. All along one wall were metal drawers that somehow reminded Hidan of the exchange point where he and Kakuzu had taken the monk Chiriku... and looking closer, he saw that the drawers were labeled with names and dates. It didn't take him long to find 'Akatsuki Member - Kakuzu', and the date on which they'd been ambushed.

He pulled open the drawer and was met with a gust of cold air. It was a refrigerated unit. And Kakuzu lay there in front of him, whole, but still and cold. Dead.

'Kakuzu,' said Hidan uncertainly, his voice catching in his throat, which was suddenly constricted and dry. 'Kakuzu...' Staggering slightly, he lifted him out of the drawer and laid him on the table. He stared down at the body of his partner, not knowing what to do, a sick weight settling on his chest. He swallowed uncomfortably, a muscle twitching uncontrollably in his cheek. The light flickered, glinting off the trays of instruments, and Kakuzu lay there on the table, doing nothing.

Suddenly Hidan grabbed a surgical knife from one of the trays, and without stopping to think, he rushed back outside, to where he'd seen a dying Konoha ninja earlier. The man's heart was still beating. Hidan slashed his chest open, and pulled it from his body. Rushing back to Kakuzu he pressed the heart into the hole that Kakashi's raikiri had made in him, where his own heart should have been.

'Kakuzu!' he moaned, 'take it, take it!' He stared at the hole in his partners chest, willing those weird little threads to come out and knit the heart into his body. But nothing happened. Hidan leant over Kakuzu, staring wildly into his face, and felt the stolen heart cease its beating under his hand. Slowly, jerkily, like a puppet whose threads are cut one by one, he sank down to rest his head on Kakuzu's chest. Blood from the heart of the unknown ninja smeared his cheek, and his bloody fingertips gripped Kakuzu's cold shoulders.

'Kakuzu,' he murmured into the cold flesh, 'you'd never let me do this if you were alive, would you? Well, what can you do now, arsehole?' He stared blankly at the blood on his fingertips, and suddenly panic, loneliness and revulsion gripped him. He slid off Kakuzu's body and down onto the floor, where he leant against the solid side of the examination table and began to shake convulsively. He thought for a moment he might be sick, and it wasn't because of the smell of corpse, either. The refrigeration had kept Kakuzu in perfect condition. He didn't smell yet at all. It was the absolute stillness and lifelessness of him, and that unfamiliar feeling of aching loss that Hidan experienced each time he looked at him. It was unbearable.

Hidan bit his bottom lip, which was trembling uncontrollably, and tried to keep down whatever was rising in him - tears, vomit, he didn't know. He was breathing fast and shallowly, and he couldn't think, he just couldn't think. He wasn't used to having to think - Kakuzu used to do all the thinking for him. 'Hidan,' he heard his deep voice in his head, 'Hidan, dodge it,' 'Hidan, above you,' 'Watch out for the shadows, Hidan...'

He took out his Jashin symbol again and pressed it to his mouth. 'Jashin-sama,' he murmured, 'Help me. Help me. I need him. I know he was an unbelieving heathen prick, but he saved your devout follower so many times. He helped me make you so many sacrifices, I owe him, seriously, please, what do I do?' But no answer came, and he couldn't think what to do. He leant there against the table as the sky got darker and darker outside, and stars came out, and the scent of evening flowers, jasmine and daphne, wafted in, incongruous in the shattered and ruinous surroundings. And Hidan crouched there trembling, listening to his own heartbeat, frighteningly loud and rapid in the stillness.

I need a heart for him that won't stop, not like that useless piece of shit, he thought and he stood again and pulled the lifeless and rapidly cooling heart out of Kakuzu, and flung it disgustedly aside. He put the Jashin symbol back in the pocket of Kakuzu's cloak, closing his hand around it so tightly that it cut into his hand before letting it go. Not stopping to think, and moved by an impulse he didn't entirely understand, he took up the knife again and this time cut open his own chest, screaming with the pain as he wrenched out his own heart and pushed it in to Kakuzu.

Then, doubled over with pain, he collapsed on top of him again. Somehow, this was a different kind of pain from the many varieties he'd experienced before, and he just couldn't take it in his stride. He tried to get a grip on himself, but to no avail - he could hear himself breathing in pathetic little hyperventilating gasps, and moaning weakly, but his body seemed to be beyond his control. One hand clasped the hole in his chest, the other tilted the immobile face of Kakuzu towards him, at which he stared, wild-eyed. His immortal heart kept on beating in Kakuzu's chest, but there was no change in that still face. Grief and pain finally began to overwhelm Hidan, and tears streamed down his face, blinding him and convulsing him so that it felt impossible to breathe at all. 'Kakuzu,' he gasped, 'Ah, it hurts, my heart, Kakuzu.'

He ran a shaking fingertip covered in his own blood over Kakuzu's lower lip and onto his tongue, as if his own blood ritual might help revive him. Still nothing happened, and he pressed his hand over his still warm and beating heart, despairing, but still willing Kakuzu's body to claim it for his own.

Head reeling with the pain, and his vision blurred by the tears that just wouldn't stop, Hidan didn't noticed the slow warming of Kakuzu's body or the flickering of his eyelids. He did notice the change in the pulse of his heart though, and for a sickening moment he thought it was going to stop beating. 'Kakuzu,' he choked out, pulling back a little and blinking desperately to try to see.

The heart settled into a slower steadier beat under his fingertips, and he clutched harder at the wound in his own chest in surprise and uncertainty. Dimly and blurrily, through his tears he thought he could see green eyes calmly regarding him. 'Kakuzu?' he said again.

He felt a hand brush his cheek, and heard a deep voice that vibrated through the body beneath him. 'Hidan? Is that tears, Hidan?'

A calloused but gentle thumb wiped the tears from his eyes, one after the other. For a moment, Hidan saw Kakuzu's living face clearly again, but he couldn't stop the flow now he'd begun. Kakuzu's hand slid around to the back of his neck and pulled his head down to rest in the hollow of his shoulder, against his collarbone. 'There there,' he said, his voice conveying amusement and concern at the same time, 'it's alright now, Hidan...'

He wanted to stay like that and simultaneously forget everything that had happened and pour it all out to Kakuzu. But - 'My heart, Kakuzu, my heart,' - was all Hidan could force out. And he felt Kakuzu's other hand explore first the exposed beating heart in his own chest, then the empty hole in Hidan's.

'Hidan!' The tone of Kakuzu's voice changed, became deeper - surprised and serious. He sat up, holding Hidan tightly to him. 'Hidan!' He sent out a thread from his wrist and swiftly sewed up Hidan's still-bleeding wound, while another did his own from the inside. He put his hands firmly on Hidan's shoulders. 'Breathe,' he said sternly, and Hidan struggled to obey. 'Again.'

Slowly, Hidan felt his body coming back under his control. He stopped shaking and the pain from where his heart should be stopped clouding his brain and filling his whole body. It still hurt like hell, at once a dull heavy ache and a sharp, stabbing, burning pain, but as he breathed in deeply at Kakuzu's repeated commands, he was able to remind himself that he was OK, he didn't really need it, he could manage without it, he wasn't, in any case, going to die.

'Fuck,' he gasped, 'fuck, that was insane,' He looked up at Kakuzu and felt a weak smile twitch at the corner of his mouth. 'I hate it when it's only me feeling it....'

'I know,' said Kakuzu, and the deep rumble of his voice soothed Hidan further. 'We'll find another heart for me, and then get this back inside you. You'll be fine.'

'Will that work?' Hidan felt sudden anxiety churn his stomach. He didn't ever want to have to deal with a dead Kakuzu again.

'I think so.' Kakuzu carefully eased Hidan to his feet and swung his legs round to get off the table. He stood there for a moment, breathing deeply, and Hidan stood between his legs, as close as he dared, and felt the familiar swooping sensation in his chest as pain turned to exultation and hovered perilously between the two.

'We'd better get out of here,' said Kakuzu finally, and stood, stretching and rolling his shoulders. 'I don't like the look of it - I suppose we're somewhere in Konoha?'

Hidan only nodded, and Kakuzu looked curiously at him, but obviously decided to leave asking questions for later. He drank some water from a tap leaning out on its pipe from the cracked and listing wall, and splashed some on his face, then accepted the soldier pill Hidan offered him. He collected the three of his masks that had been in the drawer with him, and a few small articles from the wreckage that looked useful, then supported the still shaky Hidan out of the door.