Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, Sandman, or any of the characters in either series.
Atropos
The Maiden glanced out the window and sighed. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping...and she was stuck in here, spinning thread. "Are we almost done?" she groused. "How many more of these things do we have to make?"
The Matron looked up from the thread she was currently measuring. "Only a few more, I think." She marked a place on the thread with chalk, and handed it to the old woman sitting on the other side of her.
The Crone took the thread and, brandishing a huge pair of shears, expertly snipped it exactly on the chalk mark.
"I wonder," said the Maiden as she affixed more material to her spinning wheel, "what would happen if, someday, we spun a thread and our sister didn't cut it?"
"Why, the person whose life is represented by that thread would never die," replied the Matron. "Obviously."
"Yes, but what would that really mean?" the Maiden persisted. "Mortality is so integral to human life. What would life be like for someone who wasn't mortal? It would be an interesting experiment, don't you think?"
"It doesn't seem to have agreed with Orpheus much," the Matron pointed out.
"Mmm, but he wasn't immortal from the start. He asked for something that he could only get by becoming immortal. He didn't grow up knowing he was immortal and...I don't know...coming to terms with it, I suppose. I want to know what would happen to a human for whom immortality was their natural condition."
The Matron threw up her hands. "You always speculate about the most pointless things! That's youth, I suppose."
"You do realize that we're all exactly the same age, right? We're the Three-in-One, we can't exist separately from each other. Therefore, we came into existence at exactly the same moment."
"Well, my point still holds. Every day you come up with some foolish new question to distract us with, and then it takes extra time for us to get our work done! Look, if you really want to make someone immortal, just do it and get it over with."
"I can't do it," said the Maiden in the tone of one stating an obvious fact. "Only she can do it."
With a long-suffering sigh, the Crone took the piece of thread the Matron had just handed her and cut it. But this time, instead of laying it aside as she usually did, she tied the two ends together so that the thread made a flawless circle. "Are you happy now?" she asked her sisters. "That's the last child born today, now let's go and have some tea."
"Look at him! What unusual hair and eyes! What are you going to name him?"
The woman, exhausted but happy, gazed down at her newborn son, who was asleep in her arms. "I think I'll call him Hidan."
A/N: I'm sorry I've neglected this story for so long! I lost inspiration for a while, and when it came back, I got plot bunnies for a couple of other things. But here's a shiny new chapter for you all.