A/N: Things are very interesting just now! Older chapters are interesting, future ideas are interesting, and ideas for how I can make future chapters more like older ones are interesting. I was rereading some older chapters, particularly Sympathy For The Devil, and was amazed at how much I liked them. I was also amazed at how completely different they felt. That chapter had descriptions! Physical ones! Of places and people! I'm thinking a return to my roots could be in order.

In the meantime...hee hee. Go ahead. Read the chapter.

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General, cont'd

As always, the silence couldn't last. Hidan was lulled into the mood, but Kakuzu was not. The older man folded his arms and glared. "What are you laughing at?"

Deidara coughed, barely managing to get himself under control. "The way you were glaring at each other was just funny, yeah."

"Not funny enough to deserve laughing at." Kakuzu stomped back to his seat in the grass next to the fire.

"Alright, I'm next," Sasori said. He went to take the scythe, but felt resistance. Hidan stared at him over the red blades, searching. Sasori's heart did a double beat. It's like he's looking at my soul. He fought the urge to look or run away, and stared back as blankly as possible. Do I look like I would do anything to your precious scythe?

Hidan let go. "Sorry," he mumbled. It was obvious that he had not meant to genuinely scare anyone. That he had was an accident. Sasori accepted his apology with a nod. Will I ever be able to be touched or have someone look me straight in the eyes without thinking of that demon?

He took a deep breath and did his best to push that aside. "How do we test wind chakra?"

Hidan picked up one of the sliced logs that had not yet gone into the fire. "I think we can act a little less chickenshit this time. Right?" He looked back at the fire where Kakuzu and Deidara sat. Deidara nodded. Kakuzu said nothing. "Alright." Hidan nodded at Sasori, who started channeling chakra into the scythe. Slowly, gently, Hidan held the log horizontally with a hand on each end and lowered it down. When the wood met the upper blade, contact was soundless. Sasori felt nothing. And the log continued to move! He felt like he was watching a science fiction hologram in real life. Were the log and the scythe both materially real?

When the log finished passing through the scythe's blade (so it seemed), Hidan pulled his hands apart to hold two half-length chunks of wood. "Slicy chakra," he announced.

Sasori was not surprised. Nice to have it confirmed. What can I do with chakra that is sharp? As far as he knew there were no other properties of his chakra that needed testing, so he handed the scythe back and returned to the porch to think about this question.

Ruta crossed the backyard to hand his laptop to Itachi, who sat near Sasori on the porch. Itachi took it easily, wondering how Ruta had known to entrust him with observing the test. Itachi doubted that Kisame would have gossiped about his personal characteristics. Perhaps Ruta had recognized a kindred spirit through his own observations.

Hidan closely scrutinized the tiger man. "Hmm… What kind of chakra do you think you have?"

"Fire."

"Cool. Give me a sec, then go." Hidan handed him the scythe and stepped back. Ruta held the scythe away from himself and grinned as he channeled chakra into it.

Nothing happened.

Ruta blinked, then grinned again. "Cool!"

"Super cool!" Hidan agreed. "Hold still!" He slapped his hand directly onto the side of one of the blades, twitched, and staggered back with limp arms. "Super cool."

Ruta embedded the scythe in the ground to disperse any remaining charge. "Are you going to do that for everyone who doesn't have a good idea what chakra they have?" he asked worriedly.

Hidan surrendered to gravity and fell onto his back on the grass. "I'm immortal. Why not?"

Still, Ruta had to add, "Don't hurt yourself." He took his laptop back from Itachi and added some notes on how chakra type could not be reliably inferred from personality.

Kisame lifted the scythe from the ground, swung it over to the side, and dipped it into the partially defrosted bowl of water in one move. The water immediately refroze, as expected. He laid it on the ground for Samehada and backed away.

Samehada warbled at the scythe. After all this testing, it still did not respond. Maybe it was not like him after all. He picked up the handle in his mouth for a taste. It tasted faintly of different kinds of chakra, which quickly disappeared. The weapon used chakra, but it didn't hold any. That was disappointing.

Samehada next did what Human Cousin had suggested, and crawled on the scythe. Human Cousin even lifted the scythe off the ground, forcing him to cling tighter to it. Samehada tried not to curl his body around the handle, as that was not what the humans wanted to know about.

"How strong are you?" Ruta exclaimed. Kisame held his arms out from his body, lifting the scythe and Samehada's weight combined with pure arm muscle, not bracing it against his body at all.

"I don't know," Kisame muttered. "Feels like I'm boosting my muscles with chakra. Excuse me." He staggered forward, lowering the end of the scythe to the ground but not quite dropping it. He held the scythe just off the ground like this for two quick breaths, then lowered it down. "Pretty strong," he said with a smile.

Yahiko nodded in complete agreement as Samehada crawled off of the scythe. Kisame picked up the weapon carefully. It didn't move differently. He threw it at a tree. It didn't throw differently or defy physics, as it had under the influence of Nagato's chakra. But it was slow to fall from the tree's trunk, and in the moment before it did so, everyone's eyes were drawn to the tree. Nobody could have explained why. The tree didn't look any different.

"Can anybody sense chakra?" Hidan asked.

Itachi activated his Sharingan, then Mangekyo Sharingan. His brow wrinkled; he had to touch the tree to make sure. "Its chakra is disturbed. The disturbance is fading, though. Like...ripples."

"Clinging chakra moves at a touch," Hidan concluded. He nudged Konan's arm. "If you ever need a chakra donation, that'd make it easier."

Konan nodded. "We have learned something useful from Samehada's test, after all. Now then -"

Samehada growled loudly, like a beast covering its territory. He wasn't done! As he had done before to shock the thick-shelled cord into giving up its attack, Samehada began to work his mouth back and forth. He shivered, and felt tired and hungry. But this was more important. He bit the scythe's handle and spit chakra into it.

The scythe jerked, its head raising off the ground as if it was flailing in pain. It radiated heat and electricity as it did so, along with a faint light. That was the first time it had done anything on its own since the practice battle, so everyone's attention was riveted to the scythe. Nobody noticed Hidan twitch.

"Jesus," Kisame exclaimed. "You can spit out a chakra burst, Same?"

Samehada warbled proudly. Yes! He nuzzled the scythe, which once more lay still, unmoving in the grass.

Konan and Hidan reached the weapon at about the same time. She looked at it with concern as he lifted it away from Samehada and cradled it against his chest. "Did the chakra burst strain it?" Konan asked.

Hidan shuddered. "I didn't like it!"

"Can you still run chakra through it?"

"Yeah."

"Further testing is possible?"

Hidan sniffed. "Yeah. 'S fine."

"You feel pain when your scythe is hurt?" Ruta clarified.

Almost everyone glanced at him, then at Hidan. Wait, was that true? The scythe had reacted to his anger. If he was connected to it enough to make that possible, why shouldn't the reverse be true? He did treat it like a part of his body…

Konan kept her gaze on Ruta. Did that count as disobedience? Hidan's connection with his scythe did not seem to be related to the matter she wished him to keep quiet on, but it may prove to be related. There is no way for him to know if it is. Then again, there is no way for him to know if it is not. He should exercise greater caution and refrain from speaking about things which may be related. But, everybody except her were civilians who lived in a world in which mistakes did not have dire consequences, and in fact had already made a number of mistakes and sideways moves that did not have dire consequences. The battle with the succubus came to mind; it had gone completely sideways, yet ultimately was successful. Why should they exercise such caution? Was she being excessively strict by the standards of this world? Konan had learned a lot about this world, but not enough to know that.

She decided not to bring it up. The idea that Hidan could empathize with his weapon, if it was related to the other thing, was so distantly related that talking about it presented no great danger. Also, Ruta did not seem to have any idea that it possibly could be related. If she told him that, he would invariably generate a number of hypotheses that he would then be unable to share. It would not be smart to test his secret-keeping capacity unnecessarily.

Hidan looked mildly confused at the question. He never actually described what his experience was when the scythe moved on its own during the battle. Why hadn't he? Well, it was a high-stress scenario. Nobody wanted to ask about something that was that important to him, any more than they wanted to ask Sasori what he'd felt when the succubus nearly pulled out his soul. Too personal!

But unlike Sasori's experience, Hidan's seemed to be important and relevant. It was also very out of character for him not to be volunteering to answer the question. Staying silent seemed like a warning sign. Nagato cleared his throat. "Is it similar to when I projected my chakra?" Maybe that'll pry him out of his shell. It's not normal for him to have a shell. He didn't say anything earlier, and now he's not saying anything either. What's going on? Is he okay?

Hidan's hands curled around his weapon's handle at the question. "Nah. That felt kinda a lot like when Dei stole it, now that I think about it. This was just like...like a shock. I feel fine now, so I think it's fine. Nothing's broken. I'd feel broken if it was."

"I can use projected chakra to control things," Nagato remembered. "Could I use that to steal your scythe?"

"Fuckin' hope not."

"Yeah, I know you wouldn't let me, and I would never try, but could I?"

"Dunno. Please don't try."

"Hey…" Ruta ran his fingers along the keys of his laptop, looking around in quick, nervous, prairie-dog glances until he had most people's attention. "What happened? Stealing a scythe?"

"Oh my God," Deidara whispered. "Nobody told you?! I have to tell him, hm." He proceeded to tell Ruta about the battle. Ruta listened attentively as Laurie had, smiling and leaning forward. He didn't look at Deidara, which made it harder to tell the story, but Dei did his best to sound dramatic using varying tones of voice. When he got to the climax of the battle, he slowed down to elaborate, heighten the tension: "I was flying away with it, out of sight of Hidan, out of reach of the rope, scythe in my owl's talons. No reason to expect an attack from anyone, yeah. But then...the scythe leaped up and attacked on its own!" Ruta gasped. Deidara grinned and described the rest of the battle. He had not seen what happened after being suddenly attacked by a scythe, so that part was lifted from Konan's telling of the story to Laurie. Konan didn't mind. She was too busy realizing that the way Hidan had seemed partially possessed until he reconnected with his weapon might just be important.

Deidara finished with the snake boy using his powers to restore Hidan's legs. "And that's why we have a little patch of forest up the road from us, hm."

Ruta clapped. "You are an amazing storyteller!"

Deidara blushed. "Not that good, yeah."

"Aw, come on, you've heard me talk. I could never hold a story together like that," Ruta insisted on gushing. Deidara had no choice but to accept the praise.

Once Deidara gave in, Ruta returned to his duties as a scribe. "So… It used sharp wind-style chakra. The same kind of chakra Hidan has. He was connected to it with a rope. Can ropes carry chakra?"

"Yep." Hidan said this as if it was no big deal, as if other people should have just inferred what had really happened from a couple of disparate facts he had not explicitly joined before. Kakuzu facepalmed. "Well, this one can," Hidan went on to say. "It's a big, long stretch of carbon fiber. Heavy-duty shit."

"What happened?" Ruta was both an outsider and inconsiderate when excited. He was not going to refrain from asking about very personal things the same way the rest of the Akatsuki was. "From your perspective? What did you see? Feel? It must have been interesting."

Hidan hesitated. "Uh… It was… Like being...broken." He looked confused again. "Even I don't know what the fuck happened there. My memories are broken too. I saw white. I think I saw the bird. But I couldn't have, right? I remember reaching out, clawing, but I also didn't because I could barely feel my body. My mind and everything was all split up."

Konan and Sasori became very still. "I believe I separated my soul from my body once," Konan said slowly. "I turned inside myself, with my body unmoving."

"I saw things with my soul when the incubus pulled it out," Sasori added.

"What?!" Hidan's eyes filled with water. "And you didn't tell me?"

"It's a very dangerous technique," Konan said. "I had no idea anyone else could experience such a thing."

"Oohh." Ruta nodded as if this all made sense, was perfectly expected. "You split up your soul and possessed your scythe, which has a chakra system and everything you would need to do that, and thanks to awesome rope you could bring chakra with you, and yeah. Cool!"

Crickets chirped. The fire crackled. A piece of wood fell apart under its own weight; the fire really needed more wood added to it, but nobody moved to add any. Konan turned to Hidan. "Is this true?"

"It sounds right." Hidan was smiling. "Yeah, I like that." More importantly, he is not reacting as if this is something others should not know about. It is safe, then.

"Souls…?" Deidara's jaw hung open. "Possession?"

Ruta frowned. "I don't know how he could have seen out of it since it doesn't have eyes, but I don't know that much for sure. Maybe it's possible."

"Thank the gods," Konan murmured under her breath. Her shoulders slumped. Finally. Another mystery has been put to rest. I have wondered how Hidan, with his immortality, could have died. Even buried in the ground, he should have lived. He must have moved his soul out of his body, chosen to die. I hope he is satisfied with that choice.

Sasori glanced around. It had felt oddly good to talk about his experience. Clearly ignoring it was not helping him to heal, so perhaps talk was what he needed. But, as usual, nobody was asking. He'd gotten some startled glances when he first chimed in, but now everybody was back to pretending nothing had ever happened to him. Well, the time for that was over.

"It's a good thing the demon didn't attack you directly, then," he said to Hidan. "Could've pulled you out of your body in one yank."

More startled glances. Hidan laughed, which was good. Sasori had been attempting a joke. "Yeah! Shit, I must be all loosey-goosey in here. Is that a part of Other Me's religion? Cool!" Hidan shook his head, set that topic aside. "Hey, did I ever thank you?"

It was unclear who Hidan was talking to, but Sasori decided he could speak as well as anyone. "For what?"

"For keeping me safe," Hidan answered. "She only hated me."

We're heading into personal, touchy-feely territory. The thought of such territory made Sasori's skin crawl. The thought of what he had to do as part of the etiquette of such a situation made his heart beat fast and his hands shake. He didn't want to continue with this line of discussion any further. Yet, he really did. He gathered his courage, then got to his feet and sat down next to Hidan in the middle of the grass. Oh god I do so much better at being impersonal. I do not do touchy-feely! Having expressed that little bit of panic to himself, Sasori told himself to shut up and boxed it away.

"It's fine," he replied to Hidan. "After the bar, I was the first person she approached. Those demons must have a sense of what their prey likes; she knew then that I wasn't prey. She called me a mutant later. So no, she didn't only hate you. By the time anyone else had anything to worry about, she hated me too."

"Fuck," Hidan whispered sadly. "What'd you see? Did you at least get something interesting out of that?"

"I'm not so sure you want to hear what I saw."

"Why not?"

"Because after I saw it, I understood what she saw in the spiritual climate around here," Sasori told him. "You lose your memory around things like that."

Having been twice and thoroughly warned, Hidan took a good while to decide if he wanted to proceed. "As much as you can," he finally requested.

"Colors," Sasori said. "Colors that are too vivid and blended with other colors to possibly exist in normal reality. They were also more than colors; they had force and power and I recognized them as all having meanings. A collection of them was called benevolence. Another one was a very specific quality of sound. And there was one that was mixed in unevenly, more than usual. I didn't look closely at it." Did I say that last thing because I really didn't look closely, because I don't like what I saw, or because I want to spare his feelings? You know what, I don't care. I don't feel like looking closely at my memories of it right now.

Hidan looked ill, even in the waning firelight. Somebody finally noticed and added more wood to the poor thing. The fire gained new life and licked at the new wood happily. Perhaps the sight of it inspired Hidan. "How… How'd it look? Bad?"

"No." Sasori wiped his hands on his pants and tried to ignore the feeling of eyes on his skin. "No, it looked fine. They all looked balanced. Nothing was going to fall apart. I said that to the demon, and she fell apart when she heard it. Overly sensitive much?" The irony did not calm him down. He couldn't quite ignore the feeling of being watched. This is enough. I said what I saw, as much as anyone wants to hear, I've established that I am not a delicate flower, and now I would like to go back to being ignored please. He returned to the porch.

Almost everyone returned to their carefully averted gazes, which he was now grateful for. Almost everyone. "Are you alright?" whispered Itachi, directly over Sasori's left shoulder so nobody else would hear.

"I require a careful balance of acknowledgment and distance," Sasori replied. Yes, I'm fine. Just attending to my needs, which are as delicate as those of a flower, after all. He carefully shaped and projected a single sentence of thought: "I'm sorry, delicate flowers, for the insult." If there was no such thing as a flower spirit or they couldn't hear his thoughts, well, nobody was ever hurt by trying to think kind thoughts.

"Understandable." Itachi cleared his throat and said, louder, "I believe it is my turn now. Is this correct?"

Konan nodded and backed away, up to the porch. Hidan blinked extra hard and handed Itachi his scythe from the grass, before clumsily crawling away to sit by the fire. He waved a dismissive hand at Kakuzu when the older man suggested he go inside and rest. I… I don't want to… I won't be driven away from my friends when I don't wanna be.

Itachi held the scythe out as far as his arms could extend before channeling chakra into it. The heat was noticeable even to those near the fire, though it did not extend as far as the porch. Itachi nodded; thanks to Konan, everyone but Ruta knew exactly what kind of chakra they had before testing a thing. Luckily, Itachi had something much more interesting to try, if only he could figure out a way to test it.

He raised a hand so that he held the scythe by two different places, blades facing away from him. Eye to eye. Itachi closed his eyes and activated the Mangekyo Sharingan, sent chakra into his eyes. He raised the handle of the scythe so that it directly touched his eyelids, and fluttered his eyelids to get the chakra to release. There was a burst of pain in his eyes, and the chakra was gone.

What?... Does this technique damage my eyes? Itachi wondered why he hadn't considered this before. Surely sending bursts of chakra out of a body part as delicate as the eyes had to have some effect. He blinked the worst of it away and looked down at the scythe. He didn't see it; it had become completely invisible.

Kisame straightened up quickly. "It's still there, right?"

"Yes. It's only invisible, giving the illusion that it is gone." Itachi curled and uncurled his hands around the handle. His eyes told him he was holding empty air, but his hands felt metal. Amazing!

"Can I check before the chakra runs out?" Yahiko asked while getting to his feet. A lot of people, it turned out, shared this desire. Konan hung back while they had their fun and contemplated what would happen to the scythe if it received the chakra for a different kind of genjutsu. Would it become silent under aural genjutsu? Develop a strange texture completely different from its metal one under a touch-based genjutsu? The possibilities were endless. She felt like a fool for even mentioning the chakra-testing methods available in her world. The scythe was in a completely different league. What did pieces of paper that could only have 5 reactions to one quality of chakra have in common with this weapon? She appreciated the value of paper, but in this case, it was pathetic.

As Kakuzu's chakra had, Itachi's chakra eventually wore off, and the scythe returned to its normal appearance. Itachi really did not want to test anything else having to do with his delicate eyes - in fact he decided right then to get his eyes checked as soon as possible - so he handed the scythe off to Deidara. Who stood there, doing absolutely nothing with it. "Um, we already saw what my chakra did, yeah. This thing exploded at the slightest touch."

"Enough to splash the lake out," Hidan added, "so I completely support not testing that."

"What about ordinary chakra?" Konan asked. "Even people with bloodline limits have one of the 5 elements dominant. Your plain chakra is not explosive."

Deidara hesitated. "And how do I release that, yeah?"

"Through anything other than the mouths on your hands," Konan guessed.

"Oh." Deidara looked down. Everybody who had palms seemed to have used chakra through their palms. Where else could he release his? Through my feet, maybe? He put the scythe down on the ground, clasped his hands together so they would do nothing, and stood on the scythe's blades. And prayed.

His shoes did not burst into flame. He took a deep breath and stepped off. Hidan grunted and made himself stagger over. "Nothing," he reported after touching the scythe. "That makes it stony or slicy."

Deidara lifted the scythe and brought it down on an open space of grass. The impact could be both felt and heard. "Huh. That is the last kind of chakra I ever expected to have, hm." Ruta added some more notes.

"Not really," Itachi said. "Your chakra binds clay as tightly as rock. Unmaking those bonds is what gives your creations such explosive power. If I had ever thought about it, I would have guessed you had earth chakra."

"Yeah, but… I'm not really an earthy guy. Kakuzu I can see; he's naturally hard and tough and stonelike. But I'm not like that at all, yeah!"

Itachi shrugged and conceded the point. Ruta made more notes. "We should really get a larger subject pool for this," he proposed.

"Not tonight, Tiger Kid." Hidan slung an arm around Ruta's shoulders.

Ruta immediately stopped typing and jerked upright. "Hey!" He turned to Hidan. "Konan said I was like your original!"

Hidan tried and failed to keep himself from laughing. "Really? Other Me was a murderous psycho with the maturity of a 13 year old!"

"But he was perfectly fine company as long as you prepared yourself to expect only what you could from him," Ruta said. "Or something like that."

Hidan, still grinning, patted Ruta on the head with one hand. Ruta smiled and leaned in. Hidan ruffled his hair. "You're a cute kit."

"Mya!"

Hidan laughed as Kakuzu scowled. Not out of genuine displeasure; out of sudden insecurity. She might have been annoying, but was it right to leave a kitten in vampire territory?

In the abandoned houses

Kivi set his newest charge down on the floor of the basement. Soye stood 6 feet away, arms crossed. This was just an evaluation; she wasn't going to fight back as she would in training. Kivi bellowed, "Attack!"

The kitten lunged forward and sank her teeth into the back of Soye's heel. Or she would have if she was older - as a kitten, Mraa didn't have teeth sharp or powerful enough to do that just yet. But she would when she was older, and then this move would be useful indeed.

"Subdue!"

Mraa jumped up and pressed a paw against Soye's forehead.

"Disarm!"

The kitten leaped from shoulder to shoulder, shimmied backwards down both forearms, out of reach if a knife should suddenly appear in either hand. Her feet detected nothing.

Kivi called her back. Soye gave an approving nod. "A quick learner."

Mraa crawled up Kivi's forearm on a search for treats. He smiled. "It comes naturally to her."

"Bring her along," Soye ordered. "I can tell she hasn't had blood yet. Every cat should know the taste of the hunt."

"Of course."

That was the only order Soye needed to give. As one, every vampire in every den knew it was time to go out. The basements they nested in were secure and windowless. Perhaps their knowledge was the result of a batlike instinct, which amused the movie lovers. Perhaps they had a low-level hive mind, which would also amuse the movie lovers. Movie vampires always had such fantastical powers. As far as any living vampire could tell, all they actually had the power to do that nothing else could was subdue other living beings more easily. That was not nothing, as Mraa's training proved, but it was a far cry from psychic powers and magic.

They still would not fare well, for instance, if they encountered packs of wolves. Even less well if they encountered humans, who could help other beings resist forced taming. That was why they bothered training their physical combat skills. Just in case…

On the other side of the forest, Makuto and Sakumo reached an agreement. Something had to be done to repair clan harmony. Why not a group hunt?

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A/N: *snickers*

This kitten was last mentioned in Lightbringer, chapter 69.

*sigh* Wow. Haha! Love it!