Chapter 8: Cannabis

"What's that smell?"
Sika had been hearing people say that every night for the past four days. A few maids at first, and then her younger step sister, but now it was the older girl, the bossy almost-adult that thought she run the place. The door to her room slid open, the lights from her bedroom illuminating the darkened hall way.
"Sika, do you- oh! Oh my god!"
Sika rose her eyebrows and brought two fingers to her lips. She took the object from between them and blew a cloud of smoke in to the air.
"It's you! Lord help me, is that- oh, oh my lord, it is! Put that out!" The still teenager shrieked. Her gaze was intense.
"No."
"Put it out! Now!" She was near screaming, her fists clenched and her black hair barely stayed behind her shoulders. It was beginning to muss with her exaggerated frustration.
Sika put the joint back to her lips and sucked, the hot tip burning further down the brown paper she'd rolled it in. "No," she repeated, the joint moving with her lips.
"Put it out now before I go get our fathers!" She commanded, "there will be consequences!"
Sika shrugged. "Knock yourself out."
Sika could practically see the flames of hell in her eyes as she turned around and stomped off, leaving the door open.
A maid passed by, smiled meekly at her, and then hurried on her way, picking up her pace in a hurry to leave. Another, much more confident woman came by and dumped her ashtray in the time it took for the men of the house to arrive.
Sika's step father led the way, coming to stand in her doorway with a scowl set on his features. Sika's own father fallowed closely behind him, looking much more worried.
"What is the meaning of this?" Isao barked.
Sika had to stop a second and revaluate herself before she spoke. She was sitting, well, more like laying, in a slumped over position in an overstuffed, plush chair. Her katana leaned on the chair's leg and the table next to her held three kinds of pop and a wide assortment of snacks besides her ashtray.
At least she was being clean about it.
"Pot," the tawny haired girl drawled, pulling the joint from her lips once again to blow white smoke from her lungs. Her eyes were probably puffy and red, but she was oh so relaxed. She really couldn't be bothered to care.
Isao's eyes widened and his features set harder. He was frustrated with her, she knew it. He thought she was trash, she knew that too.
As her step father's mouth opened to begin lecturing or screaming, something, a hand set gently on his shoulder before the words came out. Sika's father smiled warmly at his husband and something passed between them. Isao took a step back, lowering his head unconscious submission, and let his husband though.
"Oh father, you can't!" Kasumi shouted, her tone full of contempt and disbelief. Isao shot his daughter a glare and she was silenced.
Sika's father looked though the smoke at his own daughter, unmoving and unspeaking. He simply starred at her, a small smile set on his face. He was disappointed, Sika decided as she took another drag.
"Want some?" She offered, holding out the joint to him.
He didn't respond for a moment. He'd been thinking and that'd caused a short circuit in his brain. She watched him reboot and then he answered, "no thank you," polite as ever.
"Come," he said to the rest of the family, revolving to face them. Isao made no more motions against her, simply put a hand on the back of his sputtering daughter and guided her away from the room. With his left hand, Sika's father moved to close the bedroom door, looking over his shoulder and the small smile gone. He wasn't going to yell, she wasn't in trouble. She was an adult after all.
The knob clicked shut and he was gone.
Sika drew in another breath of smoke.
"Hey, what's that smell? Is there a skunk?"
Sika thought for a moment she might put her smoke out if Suta was gonna barge in, she didn't exactly want the child of the house seeing her doing drugs, but Isao called his name and she heard the thumps of his feet get quieter on the hardwood until they were gone with him.
Sika exhaled once again and pulled a baggie out of the chair cushion. In it was a bunch more weed and some papers to roll it with. She'd have to tell the guy to keep it coming.

"What are you smoking?"
Sika gazed at her younger brother, her head tilted back and the joint hanging loosely from her lips. She sat outside on the porch behind her room. She'd been enjoying the court yard, facing the complex's back wall and hedge of flowers when Suta walked around the house, his feet noisily scuffing the earth as he neared her. Even if Sika had not been a shinobi she would have known he was coming.
"Stuff," she chuffed.
"Are you supposed to be?" He asked. He hadn't meant it mean, he was really just curious.
"Yeah," she replied, but snuffed it out on the wood of the porch and set the joint down behind her.
"Kasumi said you weren't and not to go around you," he fallowed up. He sounded like a classic kid. He sounded like he wanted to get near her, but he wasn't quite sure if he should.
He was too old for this, Sika thought.
"It smells funny, too," the boy added as an after thought.
"Do you always do everything she says?" Sika asked, cocking an eyebrow. A shy smile crossed Suta's face. Sika smirked too.
"I bet she said not to come around me before I started smoking, though, is that right?" The older sibling asked.
"Yeah, the day you got here," he agreed. He was a little tattle tale, wasn't he?
"So what do you think?" She asked, pulling her left leg to fold it up under herself.
He thought for a moment, his smile widening, "I think you're kinda cool."
That made Sika laugh, her smile melting into a genuine, but slightly skeptic smile, "well thanks."
"Nobody will explain to me why us being related is different from everybody else," he said coming closer to her. He stopped a few feet away, still unsure. "Dad keeps saying it's the same, papa just says yeah, and not to worry about it, and Kasumi keeps saying it's way different, but nobody wants to tell me what it's about. It's all hush-hush, I don't get it."
"And let me guess, you wanted me to tell you all about it?" Sika laughed a little harder, almost out of spite, "because Kasumi's being a bitch about it and you guess you'll just ask me and I'll spill it?"
Suta nodded, taken back, and maybe a little hurt she'd laughed at him. "Everybody's treating me like a little kid," he mumbled.
Sika huffed.
She probably shouldn't tell him.
Her father and his husband had made it clear to the boy that he wasn't supposed to know. They'd specially told him not to worry about it, and she thought, if she didn't tell him, then he'd probably forget about it.
She shouldn't tell him, but she was going to.
"You and me are half siblings. We have the same father. I mean, you know two guys can't have kids, right?" Sika rose her eyebrows and spoke very carefully and levely. She didn't want to upset him with her tone. She'd rather him be rightfully upset with the message of the words rather than the way she'd said it.
"Yeah. I knew that," he said, a bit sad, "that guys couldn't- not that, you know."
"Yeah. But," Sika mused, "blood don't matter as much as you think. You grew up with them, they're not no less your family."
"Is it okay that I still wanna get to know you too?" He asked, looking up from a very interesting spot on the ground.
Sika laughed again, this time it was joyful and she smiled whole heartedly, "yeah, yeah. There's nothing wrong with that."

When Sika sat down at the dinner table, she sat on the far end, away from her father, away from her stepfather, and somehow all three of her step-siblings hand ended up on the opposite side. Suta, however, who was the last to the table, plopped down right next to her, grinning like a fox in a hen house.
Kasumi glared at Sika like she was a traitor but the kunoichi did not acknowledge it.
Dinner was prepared by one of the two maids and consisted of grilled fish, white rice, spring rolls, and a thin broth soup with large chunks of vegetables.
It was food, so it was good.
Sika ate probably twice as much as she should have, because, you know, food.
Kai looked downright disgusted. The sisters didn't look her way. Her own father looked bewildered, but he tried not to make faces. That wouldn't be polite.
"Didn't they feed you where you came from?" Kai tried to joke, grimacing through his fake smile.
"No," Sika answered flatly. She wasn't in the mood for jokes. She reached for a fourth spring roll.
"Where'd you live before you lived here?" Suta asked, genuinely curious.
Oh, right, he didn't know about the whole…
"I don't know if that's a-" Sika's father tried to stop the conversation before it started. He failed.
"I worked in a brothel," Sika answered between bites of food, her mouth full still, "you know what that is, don't you?"
"Oh for goodness sakes!" Kasumi interjected, pulling Suta's surprised look away from his oldest sister and redirected it to the now second oldest sister. "He's a child!" She interrupted, personally offended.
"Oh come on," Sika retorted, eyebrows furrowed in frustration, "he's eleven, I'm sure he already knows what it is," she snorted, " 'Kids old enough to know anyway."
"I'm sorry, but I'm not sure if teaching promiscuity to a child is a good idea!" Kasumi spat back.
Sika groaned and rolled her eyes. "You know, it's not like I'm telling him how to have sex. And, fuck, like knowing what a brothel is made you promiscuous. What rock did you crawl out from under?"
"Alright, alright," Isao cut in.
"That's enough," Sika's father agreed.
Shrugging, Sika accepted she'd lost the argument and relaxed into her seat at the table. She'd smoked before she'd come out of her room, so it was easy for her to forgive and forget in just that moment. She accepted her father felt bad enough for what he'd done to her to let her stay in his home, but she couldn't exactly go around fighting with his replacement kids, now could she?
If they wanted to get technical, Sika was an adult, and she should probably be living on her own or married, but she didn't exactly have any money of her own to move. She was on call for the Akatsuki twenty-four seven, and poofing off in the middle of the work day and returning drenched with someone else's blood wasn't exactly acceptable work wear.
Sika doubted very seriously that her father felt anything for her other than pity, and that was fine. As long as she had food and a bed she wasn't complaining.
"Sika," Suta mumbled, unsure if he should speak. Everyone was glad he broke the tension. "Could you help me with my math homework after dinner?"
Asami looked sort of relieved. He usually asked her for help, and she was hopeless at math.
She really wanted to just be honest with him and tell him that she was way too high to even reason, much less do math, but she supposed that was where she was supposed to draw the line. Now that wasn't something you should say to a kid.
"Yeah, sure uh, in a while."

Sika was sitting, alone, she might add, at a table in a parlor room, toking a joint when the door opened.
"Hello," her father greeted when she didn't move to acknowledge him.
"Look, all I wanna do is sit here and get so high I can't feel my face. That's all," she told him. She was firm.
"That's alright," the man replied, and he moved to sit across from her. "I was just doing some paperwork."
He did indeed have an armful of paperwork. He shuffled it around as Sika took another puff and held the smoke in her lungs. She narrowed her eyes. What was he up to?
"The weather has been so nice lately," he mused.
Oh. Like fuck, this was happening.
"What do you want?" She spat like her words were venom.
He looked surprised, hurt almost. He straightened himself in an attempt to brush off her words.
"That was brash," he commented.
She scoffed, "out with it."
"I simply wanted to spend a little time talking. Is that too much to ask?"
Still defensive, Sika drew her arms out, placing them on the table and puffing out her chest in an effort to make herself look bigger, stronger. "I'm not sure if we have much to talk about."
"I'm sorry you feel that way," he said, solum, "and," he paused, frowning.
"I'm sorry I've hurt you. It was not my intention. I understand now what the consequences wrought."
Sika's mouth fell open in surprise but she immediately shut it. She shifted her gaze down, glaring hard at some offending piece of smoke ash on the table.
This was what she'd wanted all along but it didn't feel like it should have.
It felt dirty, and it stung. It stung somewhere down past the smoke haze, past her heart and buried deep in her guts. It made her feel like she wanted to puke.
"Yeah," She muttered, not sure what else to say. She knew she should have said something more respectful. Something along the lines of a formal accept of apology but Sika didn't know if she wanted to. She didn't know if she was ready.
"What are you working on?" Sika asked, hurriedly, needing to change the subject.
"Oh just," her father began, not missing a beat, "I'm looking at battle plans. I want to annex an area of farm fields beyond the port I'm working on."
"And by annex, you mean gain possession by force?"
"Well when you put it that way," he replied loftily. The edges of his mouth turned up to sort of a teasing smile. Sika didn't think it was funny.
"The larger the country, the more power we have," he reminded. Sika shrugged, frowning.
"What?" Her father asked.
"It's just I heard some stuff," she said flatly. She flicked ash off if the table, on to the floor and took another puff off her joint before she ground it into the corner of the table. Her father didn't react. The table was no worse for wear.
"None of it was good," she continued, much quieter.
"We are not a popular group," he agreed.
Absentmindedly, Sika thumbed over her pendant, twisting her fingers into the triangle and slipping them through the circle.
"I'll say."

Sika was just leaving the bathroom when she was summoned.
She'd left the cool, dark confines of the house for bright sunlight. The ground was bare, only covered by dirt and ash. What was left of the trees smoldered, steaming and smoking and filling the air with a choking haze. Something had defiantly caused a forest fire.
She managed not to fall on her ass this time. She caught herself on crouched legs and shot back to her feet to face Hidan and Kakuzu.
"Before you even start," Kakuzu barked, "we're in the middle of something. Get to work."
"What do you need me to do?" She asked, drawing her blade from her back.
Kakuzu didn't need to answer, a shower of kunai knives sent her on the offensive. The few she didn't knock away were too badly aimed to matter. Behind her, the offending party of five stood, clad in black gas masks and charcoal gray jumpsuits.
"Taking all my fun, Kakuzu!" Hidan griped, his grip tight on his scythe.
"We have something better to do," the older man growled.
Sika crouched, about to jump out into the fray but a large hand yanked her long hair, pulling her back.
"You don't regenerate if you get burnt. I've been piecing Hidan back together for three days, I don't need you singing your fingers off too," Kakuzu's voice hinted at how tired he really was. Now she was paying attention, Sika could see the seam and threads on his body hung loosely out of his tattered cloak. He and his partner were both covered in soot.
Hidan looked much more energetic, but Sika noticed the lack of blood on his person. Kakuzu hadn't let him sacrifice anyone? Whatever it was they were going at, they must have needed to do it fast. Sika also noticed his eyebrows were missing, probably burned off.
"Don't get cocky!" Kakuzu shouted, releasing her.
The jashinist sprung forward, her katana in her hand.
Immediately, kunai knives flew from her opponents hand. She knocked away any she couldn't dodge, save for one that scraped her cheek. She couldn't particularly tell whether her opponents were male or female, but it didn't matter. They were going to die either way.
The gray haze that so often clouded her brain parted and the voice in her head was shrieking. Screaming. Shouting at her through a thinning haze in her brain.
"Lay waste to them!" It howled, "murder them where they stand!"
Sika would do her best to oblige.
She invaded the first person's space without hesitation. She slashed with her katana, but the opponent dodged. It quickly turned into a dance with her pushing forward and them jumping back until an attack from the side had her switching her attention.
It was a mistake to leave herself open.
She swore and cussed, and she drew away from the fight, holding her upper arm, minus one lower arm.
"My arm!" she screeched. "Fuck!"
Here she was, and there was her god damn arm laying in the dirt and not attached to her fucking body. "Fuck! Fucking fuck!"
Kakuzu and Hidan had vanished, leaving her alone with her opponents. All five stood, still, watching.
"My fucking arm!"
These people would die. It had already been decided.
Sika would end them.
Her shirt came off, and she wrapped it sloppily around her bleeding appendage.
"Mother of all fuck!" The girl shouted. She wanted to press her hand to her bleeding stump, to roll on the ground in agony, but right now she was open to attack.
She took a deep breath, tightened her grip on her sword, and rushed forward again.
She meet someone different in battle this time, and they lost their head.
Someone else lost their fingers, and then their hand, and then their arm. Then they lost their other arm. They stayed down after they lost a leg.
Her swordsman training was doing her well, she was holding her own. She moved fast, like a dance. She was a warrior, a shinobi, a fucking killer with the intent to cause total devastation.
She dodged right to avoid a fireball launched her way. Her shirt caught fire, and she dropped it, letting it fall burning to the ground. The bleeding from her arm had slowed to a trickle.
That was a little too close for comfort.
Alright, if they wanted to fight with fire she could fight with- FUCK.
Her fucking arm was laying in the dirt, how was she supposed to make hand signs one handed?
Well, actually, nobody ever said it had to be her hand, did they?
She had three perfectly good sets of hands in front of her, not including the dead guys.
What to do with her sword, though? She couldn't exactly leave it, that was asking for trouble. She couldn't keep it in her hand either, it would impede her hand signs.
She raised the grip of the blade to her mouth and locked her jaw. That would have to do.
Sika picked off one of her opposers, the one farthest to the left, and rushed them.
She'd never tried to fight with her blade in her mouth before, and she was regretting not being prepared. She was basically throwing her entire body at her opponent and jerking her head wildly in a poor attempt to slash.
She took damage. The person she attacked was too busy trying to dodge, but his friends weren't. A kunai knife stuck in her leg, ten senbon needles stuck in her side, a string of flames narrowly missing her thigh, and blood running her clothes. All the while she grabbed wildly for a hand, anyone's hand. Her arm throbbed painfully, forcing wince after grimace each time she moved the limb.
Her lungs heaved. She huffed and sucked in hair in vain to keep her breath in time with her heartbeat. If this wasn't cardiac arrest, Sika would have been surprised.
Her muscles screamed at her to stop, but she knew she couldn't. She was wearing her opposer down. Finally, the ninja faltered, and Sika slapped her hand into theirs.
She forced her opponents finger's into the seals snake, ox, tiger, and finished with snake.
Her chakra protested, unused for weeks and then forced into compliance. It lashed somewhere deep in her belly, before water spat out of her mouth, forcing open her jaw and spraying out her nose like vomit. Her Katana shot out of her mouth like canon fire, lost somewhere in the fray. Sika felt her chakra extend to the small lake forming at her feet.
The other ninja finally struggled away, jumping out of the vicinity as enough water welled to form a wave large enough for the exploding water wall.
The water hissed as it touched the scorched trees nearby, and steam rolled from the ground as the water spread.
There were only about four inches of water here, and it was receding. This attack had been a total waste, God damn it.
Sika didn't even bother using her chakra to walk on the water, she just waited through it.
Her lungs burned almost as hard as her muscles.
Thankfully, her opponents seemed just as tired as she was. They held off as the water receded. Adrenaline worked against you in situations like this.
Sika didn't think she could get close enough to them again to use their hand to cast another Jutsu. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why hadn't she cast the Sweet Sakura Mist? She might be a little further ahead had she done that to immobilize the enemy. At least until she took a minute to think.
What other options did she have?
Sword fighting was out unless she wanted to end up as a bucket of ashes.
No more jutsu.
Shit, fuck. Her arm hurt. Her other wounds hurt too, but her arm took the fucking cake.
The ground was nothing but slippery mush now. And she was actively bleeding on it.
She wished these bastards knew what it fucking felt like to be her. To have a head buzzing with adrenaline. To have a voice that demanded destruction refusing to unscramble her thoughts.
Oh.
The realization hit her like a ton of bricks.
Hesitantly, she pulled four of the senbon needles from her side and turned them over in her fingers.
She had another option. It would be easy, what with her arm actively bleeding. Lord Jashin would be pleased.

When Sika opened her eyes, the intensity of the pleasure she experienced was seriously dampened by the horrible sting of a fresh wound and exposed bone. The air was heavy with the stench of burnt hair and urine. Sika moved to brush a strand of her muddied, snarled hair from her eyes. She was meet with resistance from the uncomfortable half hard, half sticky mess of rusty blood covering her torso.
She noted her fingernails were black, and upon turning over her hand, she discovered she'd burned off her first layer of skin. That's what she got for not being fast enough.
The muscle around her eyes ached, bruised and blackened on both sides. Her lip was split. There was skin on her chest hanging loosely.
She could still feel the holes in her side trying to close.
Very carefully, she stood up. She took a deep, stinging breath, and staggered deeper into the forest in search of Hidan and Kakuzu.

Hidan and Kakuzu were easy to find, as it turned out. There was an explosion about five kilometers to her left and Sika stumbled on strengthening feet that way.
The building looked like an old bath house and judging by a tree laying over the road to it, it hadn't been used in some time. The once cream colored walls were covered in moss and vines, and trees grew out of the third story roof up towards the sun. A gigantic hole was blown into the side of the building two stories up, so if it hadn't already been rendered useless it was now.
One of Hidan's war cries split the air and Sika knew she was in the right place.
Inside the building, dead bodies littered the floor. The walls were scarred with evidence of Hidan's scythe and sprays of blood where these worthless heathen's hearts had been pulled wrong side out by Kakuzu. There was a katana stuck in a nearby bookcase, and Sika pulled it from its confines before she continued up the stairs.
The second floor wasn't in much better shape, but now Sika could hear thumping on the ceiling, and one more set of stairs let her out onto the battlefield. The sun shone in the massive hole in the wall, illuminating a large mural of a pheasant and what might have been a locker room of sorts for the bathhouse patrons.
So soon had she rounded the wall to enter the room did Hidan's entire body go flying by her. She barely got out of the way.
"Mother of fuck," he groaned, the cable to his scythe severed and hanging loosely from his shredded cloak. He was still burnt from earlier, but it had healed some. What had not healed was a raw, bleeding patch of skin on his arm and several deep wounds to his shoulder.
"You okay?" Sika asked, looking over him but she didn't offer him a hand up.
"Yeah," Hidan affirmed, rubbing the back of his head. He looked up at her and blinked before he spoke. "What the fuck happened to you?"
"Lost my arm," Sika stated plainly. She was feeling pretty sluggish from the blood loss still. Unable to feel much more than tired.
"How in the hell do you just lose your arm?" Hidan narrowed his eyes. "Wait. Don't answer that."
Sika shrugged nonchalantly.
Behind her, Kakuzu had a pretty good handle on things. Sika turned back to watch just in time as some twisting coiling creature came spilling out of his back like ink, like writhing black tentacles. The create stood on two legs, it's yellow nose a contrast to us white face and black skin. It moved stiffly, jerking until it was standing up tall. It stood eight feet tall and it's arms bunked at its sides. Without warning it's mouth opened and lightning shot from it, hitting Kakuzu's opponent as they tried to rush him.
This was his lightning jutsu. And it was powerful.
The bolt of lightning shot the opposing man through the wall, and if that didn't kill him, the fall probably would, Sika decided.
"I guess I found you just as you were finishing up," Sika said. She tried to move her arm, to fix her bandeau, but muscles flexed and nothing moved. Oh. Right.
"Yeah. Lucky you. I hate these mob boss hits, they're stupid. This fucker sicked his best fighters on us first and then had nothing but his stupid lousy speed in the end. I swear I haven't been able to hit him a single time in twenty minutes," Hidan bitched like it was his job.
The beast standing behind Kakuzu stood still fit just a moment. A breeze blew into the room, whipping up dust from the now broken drywall. The banker grunted and the creature looked down at him. Kakuzu didn't acknowledge it, no even as it turned its back to him and slithered tail first back into his being. The pale mask settling right back into his skin.
"That's the lightning jutsu?" Sika inquired.
"Yeah. That was War," Hidan agreed. "He's got three others. The fire one's conquest, the water one's famine, winds plague."
That was pretty interesting. The masks carried the names of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Sika watched Kakuzu take a deep breath, and then he turned to them.
"How did you manage to stub your goddamn arm?" He asked sourly.
"I wasn't fast enough," the girl admitted.
Kakuzu scoffed. "Did you at least take care of your assignment?"
Sika nodded slowly.
"He can fix you. Sewed my head back at one time," Hidan notioned.
"After I find my head," Kakuzu rejected.
The masked man pushed his way past Sika and tromping down the stairs. The thumping of his feet on the wood got quieter as he left until finally, Sika couldn't hear it at all. They'd better follow him, though. Kakuzu would almost certainly leave them behind.
Sika turned and extended a hand to Hidan. He squinted, clearly concussed, at her hand before he followed her arm up to her face. They made eye contact for a few moments before he finally grabbed her hand and Sika helped pull him up. Together they followed after Kakuzu.
The banker was outside, crouched over the corpse of the man he had finished off. Sika watched as he used a kunai knife to saw the man's flesh from his body and pull his vertebrae apart from his spine. Kakuzu stood up, his fingers fisted in the man's hair.
"Where is your arm?" He asked gruffly.
"Laying in the field, I think. I don't know, I just left it to come friend you guys," Sika replied.
"You didn't think to bring it with you?" He spat.
"I've got one hand to hold a sword in."
Kakuzu rolled his eyes. "Go find it."

The first stitch in her arm wasn't painful. It was more like getting stuck with a needle. Just a little burn. The twenty-fifth, all the way until Kakuzu finished was the painful part. Sika's skin was burning red from being stuck over and over. Sika sat still as best she could, wincing all the while. The tattoo still hurt worse.
Kakuzu sat behind her, his legs folded and Sika sat in front of him, facing the hole in the wall upstairs in the bath house. Hidan lay down nearby, lounging on his side with his head propped up on his arm. He spoke quietly with Sika, being her distraction one again.
"So what's the kid like, your little brother?" He asked.
"He's okay I guess. Looks more like my dad than I do. He's just a kid, though, I think he's only like eleven?" Sika mused, keeping her eyes on her friend.
"What about the other ones?"
"Oh shit," Sika laughed, earning a smack from Kakuzu for moving. "I started smoking pot in the house. You should have seen the fucking fit my step sister through."
"You started smoking pot?" Hidan's eyebrows rose.
"Yeah. Takes the edge off. It's nice," Sika agreed. At least she wasn't feeling like she was running on empty anymore.
The conversation lulled for a moment, just long enough for Kakuzu to lean down and bite the thread loose. The end moved on its own, tucking down into her skin.
"You're done," he stated.
"Thanks," Sika replied, looking down to examine his work. "I don't have any feeling in it, though."
"You will. Give it a minute," Kakuzu grunted, and then he stood up. He paced across the room, over to a table where he'd laid the severed head. He picked it up and carried it across the room, to the door. He thumped his way down the steps just like he had earlier, leaving the building to collect his bounty without saying shit to anyone.
"Fucking typical prick," Hidan snorted. Yeah. That was about right.
"He didn't dismiss me, though," Sika shrugged. "Wanna hang out?"
"Yeah."
"What do you wanna do?" Sika asked.
"I don't know about you but I'm fucking exhausted," Hidan rolled over onto his back, sighing deeply.
"Well," Sika drawled, "this was a bathhouse I think, they've got to have something to lay down on."
They both sat there for the next five minutes, both too lazy to move. Finally, Sika stood up and went to the far side of the room. The whole wall of the building was all closets, and Sika went to the first one and opened it. She repeated the process with every one of them that didn't have a lock. There were some things. No bed roll, but there were some robes and a sheet and some other linen things that were easily thrown down on the floor to make it a little softer.
Hidan ambled over and took up the left side, leaving Sika to lay on the right. She curled up on her side facing the open wall, watching the cloud roll across the sky.
"This is a shit bed," he stated plainly.
"Yeah," Sika agreed. "Hey, Hidan?"
"What?"
"When we're both feeling better uh," She paused, debating on asking her question. "Do you maybe wanna fool around?"
He shifted, probably looking her way. "How do you mean to fool around?"
"Like," she bit her lip, "you wanna smoke some weed at my house? Or like, I dunno, grab dinner?"
"I think we'd just better be friends," he rejected.
Sika winced. Yeah. Yeah, she knew that was coming. "Okay."
"We can still get dinner and smoke," he offered.
"Okay. I mean it was silly of me to ask I guess I just felt," she paused, "lonely."
"We're shinobi, lonely is a pretty common theme," he pointed out. "But we're different."
Sika swallowed hard. "Yeah."

When Sika arrived home, the first thing she did was go right for her chair and light up. The smoke filled her lungs with herb and she puffed on her joint a few moments before she pinned it in the corner of her mouth and stepped out of her room. She needed a bath pretty bad but it was also dinner time.
Kasumi almost had a heart attack when she stepped into the dining room.
"What happened to you?!" She exclaimed.
"I went to work," Sika replied.
"Do you work at a slaughter house?" Kasumi asked, mostly sarcastic.
Sika swayed back and forth and gave her a noncommitmental hand gesture. "You could call it that."
"You have got to be kidding me! This is grizzly, this is gross! You smell, you're covered in, I don't even know-" Kasumi flew into another fit. Sika elected to ignore her.
Sika came around the table and grabbed a bowl of- wait, was that miso soup, again? She grabbed her bowl of soup laid out for her and started piling extra on top of it and in the broth. She didn't even glance at either of her fathers.
"Sika?" Sika's blood ran cold and for just a moment she paused. Suta. Shit.
"Yes?" She looked up at her youngest brother, who;' eyes were locked on her, large as dinner plates.
"What happened to your arm?" The eleven-year-old asked innocently. Sika didn't take her eyes off of him. The smoke from her joint rolled into the air.
"Uhh," she deadpanned. "I uh, cut it? But my friend er, my coworker set it straight for me."
There. She hadn't lied and she spared him the gorey details. The boy looked puzzled but he didn't speak. Hurriedly, Sika finished piling food into her bowl and retreated the room for her bedroom.

Ayye, so sorry I disappered with this story for over a year. I don't know when i'll be updating again. i've sort of moved fandoms but I still like Naruto.