A/N: I did not keep my promise. Oh well.

Uh... Super scattered right now. Not in the mood to talk. Happy reading!

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Hidan

The next day, Hidan woke up with a start. He lifted his head and blinked. Why'd I wake up just now?

He went in search of the answer. First, he checked himself for a strong emotion of some kind. There was none. He checked the window. Perhaps there had been a noise outside. He saw nothing. So he left his room. There could have been a noise in the hallway, or maybe he had woken up from the special psychic ninja sense that something significant was happening.

He saw Konan outside and went to her. She was watching the sky as it lightened in the dawn. He stood next to her and watched, too. When enough time had passed, he quietly asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"There are many things you could be asking about."

"Any of them. I know you've got stuff you don't want to talk about at meetings. Wanna get some of it off your shoulders?"

"I've been thinking about them again," she confessed. "The man who killed me, and his accomplice."

Hidan shrugged. "You died. That's a big deal. Don't beat yourself up for not getting over it."

"Will I be ready in time? I have a growing feeling like they could appear at any moment. I wonder if they're already here."

Hidan took her hand. "You don't have to be ready, all by yourself. Not yet. It's fine."

"You make a fine counselor," she remarked, and squeezed his hand back.

The sky had assumed the color of daytime. Now all that was left was for the sun to touch the trees. "Hmm," Konan said. "Why didn't that occur to me before? Hidan, you perform this function for others. But are you ever in need of it yourself?"

"That's what the lake's for," Hidan said. "And the thing in my head where, when something's too much, I can cut loose and get all drifty for a bit, and then come back with more control over it. And I can talk with Moonlight and Sunshine now. That's nice."

Konan smiled. "Right. I forgot. You can perform this function for yourself, too."

"When you say that, I get a shiver up my back. Like you're talking about something I want to know, but shouldn't."

"You are the only person who is not allowed to know it," she told him. "Everyone else already does. The vampires do. The demons, too."

"I don't like that." He pouted. "Fucking inside secrets. What was that shit Kakuzu and Sasori said about conspiracy?"

"Hidan, it is not our choice that you should not know what you are. A significantly higher power decided that. As Kakuzu said, we can only go along with it."

Another shiver ran up his back. What I am? He remembered the story of the soul coming out of the cave, the finger on the upper lip, making it promise never to tell what it knew. "Do I get to know eventually?"

"Yes. Eventually, you will be allowed to remember."

"When I die, I'll be allowed to remember," he muttered. "You think it's like that for everyone?"

Konan looked at him. "When I died, I did not remember anything. I had no conscious experience at all."

"You never made it to the afterlife," he pointed out. "So of course not. But for people that do, is that what it's like?"

"I wish I knew."

Yahiko

It occurred to Yahiko as he was brushing his hair that morning to wonder if his desire for living plushies was in any way connected to the proven fact that he liked taking care of small living things. Would a living plushie be like a toddler? As soon as he thought that, a wave of longing hit him. He put down the brush, then picked it back up again. He said goodbye to Nagato. He grabbed something to eat from the kitchen. Then he told Konan he was going to visit the haunted hospital.

He stopped at the edge of the unnatural lawn and looked at the building. It looked like any other decrepit falling-apart building at first glance. But on closer inspection, one could see parts of it that should already be claimed by gravity. He must be holding it together all the time, even when he's not there. What kind of power does that take?

"I leave a little part of me in there all the time to do that." Yahiko looked down. The demon boy stood at his right side. "No biggie."

"You're really powerful. You could do anything you wanted, couldn't you? Level cities. Put all the people in them through mind-bending dreamscapes, like you did me. But you've never done that."

"They wouldn't like it if I did that. They'd kick me out of the game."

"Who?"

"The big ideas."

Yahiko had to think for a bit to remember. "The gods."

"It's a really nice game they have," the demon boy said. "I can't really be part of it 'cause I'm a demon. But I can play sometimes, a little bit."

Yahiko's heart ached for him. "All you want is to be friends with the gods, and they won't let you?"

"No," the kid said. "They've been letting me more and more lately. I can play more of the game if I really try to, if I don't break any of the rules. But it's hard not to break any of the rules."

"You're breaking the law of gravity right now."

"That's not one of the rules, silly! That's just a mechanic."

"Oh, I see. You mean stuff like defying the flow of time. Telling people too much about the future. If you did that, you would be kicked out of the game." That's why he only hints!

"Yeah." The demon boy looked sad. Yahiko patted him on the head.

Suddenly, he remembered something he had not thought about for a very long time. "You're not the only one kept out of the game," he told the boy. "Hidan said once that he wasn't predicting the future, he was describing it. Like he already knew it. But he has those restraints on his soul that prevent him from breaking the rules. He couldn't have told us any more without losing the ability."

"The others didn't have any restraints."

"The others were kicked out of the game. Dead at 34. Lived surrounded by followers, everyone hanging on to his every word, almost none of them understanding the words. If they didn't die, they sure weren't part of the world. Not the ordinary world."

The demon boy made thinking sounds as he mulled this over. Then he looked up at Yahiko. "Will you play with me?"

Yahiko grinned. "Of course!"

They walked into the hospital together, him holding the demon boy's hand. Yahiko noticed a page of the checkin/checkout log turning. He waved. "Hi!" Then he remembered why he had come to the hospital in the first place. "Where's your friend, the little snake kid?"

The demon boy pointed upward. Upward they went, Yahiko carefully testing each step of the stairs. The demon boy was friendly, he knew, but for a very special definition of friendship. And the boy had started to giggle as soon as he tried the stairs. So Yahiko was very tense and nervous until he reached the top. Being friends with superpowerful beings of unconventional morality is hard!

He found the snake child in the room with the hospital bed that had a depression in the pillow. He turned white when the depression moved, as if someone lying there had turned to look at him. But he went in anyway, because the snakelike toddler was sitting on the bed with the ghost. "H-hi. Um. Excuse me. I just wanted to talk to…" He gestured in the snake child's direction. I'm being so rude right now. I was nice and waved hello to the other ghost downstairs. Why can't I be nice to this one? They're both ghosts. Is it just because she has a hospital bed and that guy downstairs doesn't? Am I treating her differently just because she had the bad luck to get sick? "So I hope you don't mind," he mumbled as he searched for a place on the bed that the ghost did not seem to be occupying. He perched on the very edge of it, next to the snake child. "I'm not sitting on anything, am I?" he asked the demon. The demon boy gave him a thumbs up, then left. But Yahiko had no doubt he was still watching.

"Hi," he said to the snake boy.

The snake boy looked up at him. His sad eyes were just as sad as always.

"You look like you need a hug," Yahiko said, holding out his arms. The snake boy leaned into them. They hugged. Yahiko closed his eyes. It feels good to hold a toddler. So, so good. "Would you like to hear about a new idea I had last night?" He felt the snake boy nod. "So there's this game I like to play…" He told the snake boy all about the plushies and his intention to bring them to life if he could. "They're so cute and small and holdable," he gushed. "If they were alive, it would be even better. They would be -" Am I saying too much? He patted the snake boy's head. "They would be like you."

The boy sat back and looked up at him. How could anyone mistake him for a kid? He understands so much. You can see it in his face. The boy raised a hand and placed it directly on Yahiko's heart. Yahiko smiled. "I know. I'm way too much of a mess right now to have kids of my own. But maybe someday, and until then I can always adopt. Not officially adopt. I mean unofficially. Like you. You ever want a hug, just come to me."

The boy crawled into Yahiko's lap and closed his eyes. Yahiko held him. It was physically uncomfortable to do this while perching on the very edge of a bed, but he didn't mind. What a nice kid!

He thought about the future. I don't really care if I have kids of my own. Actually, I might prefer to adopt. Who would I adopt with? I would love to adopt with Nagato. But not as a couple. But if I suggested it, that's how he would see it, and it would be hard for him. Not him. Hidan? Hidan sees me the same way! Someone I wouldn't be torturing. But who would that be?

Deidara

Deidara, Kakuzu and Hidan lined up in the backyard for a training session. Konan had them practice throwing shuriken and kunai at targets painted on various parts of trees. Then she asked them to spar.

Deidara looked fearfully at Kakuzu and Hidan. "I'm totally out of my league, yeah."

"Don't worry, I'll be gentle," Hidan said through a grin that indicated he would be anything but.

Deidara actually did fairly well. His original may not have been a taijutsu master, but flying gave him good reflexes and strong core muscles. Hidan looked way too happy, but Deidara didn't feel like he was just being toyed with. "Maybe we can do some of this in our next training battle," he panted when it was over.

Hidan wiped his hair out of his eyes. "Now that we agreed to invite people to them, they can be more of an entertainment thing. We can do them whenever we want, not just whenever we've reached a new point in training."

"Yeah, I would like to fight more often, hm!"

"With ten members, that's 35 possible matchups," Kakuzu said. "Rotating through all of that would take long enough for people to get new skills. There's no danger of us becoming boring."

"Whaddaya think?" Hidan asked Konan.

"This would be excellent as a long term arrangement," she replied. "Once we are capable of making long term arrangements."

Hidan pumped a fist in the air. "Fuck yeah!"

Konan pronounced their performance in the sparring session acceptable, so they went off to cool down. Deidara went around front. He saw the shed. Would it be wrong to look at his stuff when he's not here? I'm just going to look, yeah, not touch anything. He crept up to the shed, though there was nobody watching. He opened the door, stepped inside, and nearly leaped out of his skin. Holy fuck!

Mechanical parts and structures filled the space. The whole center of the room had been clearly delineated as a work zone, leaving only a very narrow space around it through which one would have to walk with their arms raised to avoid accidentally bumping the things on the tables. Those things… What were they? Deidara edged closer to the table on his right to find out. The table on his left was filled with drawings and rudimentary blueprints. The table on his right, he determined, held mechanical legs. There were only four so far. Maybe he wants to test them in use as load-bearing structures. That would explain the thing in the center of the room, which was only a metal shell with two segments. The completed creation would have three segments and a pair of legs for each one.

Deidara reached out for one leg before remembering his promise not to touch anything. He leaned in all different directions to study it from new angles. It was long. When straightened, it would be as long as Deidara's leg. But it wasn't built to be straightened. The top of it was a ball built to rotate, and so was the bottom joint for the foot. The middle joint was a basic extensor joint, capable of straightening and bending in a single direction. As of now, the leg had exposed cables running in a groove between lengths of metal. Deidara guessed the final version would receive some kind of casing. By following the cables, he determined that the engine which controlled the whole leg would be located at the top, next to the ball joint. There was a space there, inside of which sat a winch that the cables were loosely connected to. The cables would serve as muscles, controlling the middle extensor joint and bending or straightening the leg.

Deidara looked at the foot more closely and saw that it had a very basic setup. The ball joint had three things attached to it. One cable would swivel the foot forward. Another would lift it up. And a third connected to a lever which would do the opposite of the second cable, forcing the foot down. Deidara shivered at curved pieces of metal that also lay on the table. They're claws.

He looked back at the shell in the center of the room. It lacked a certain something that Deidara sensed from the leg. Does he know what he's doing there? Or is that what he's trying to draw out, yeah? Deidara guessed that organizing the contents of the body was what Sasori needed the extra week for. Until he had something to attach them to, the legs were useless for all their finery.

He left the shed with great appreciation for Sasori's mechanical genius. He also thought of bugs, and found himself not shivering at the thought. Instead, he wondered if that was how their little bug legs were built. Can Sasori help me get over my fear of bugs?

Kisame

"I have news," he told Tammy over lunch. This time, it was her lunch. He did not know when he would next be called, so he had to get straight to the point. "My group has a, uh, group uniform. It's become more than just a uniform. It was worn by Konan, who gathered us all together and did her damnedest to convince us to leave our previous individual lives and join with her. Getting the uniform symbolizes agreeing with her and officially with a capital O allying ourselves with this group and becoming part of it, not just kinda sorta part of it. It's hard to explain, but trust me, getting the uniform is a Big Deal."

Tammy nodded. She couldn't say anything past her sandwich, but her eyes were bright and open.

"Itachi got it yesterday. That leaves me as the only remaining holdout. The only one who hasn't made that commitment. The only one who's not totally, 100% sure that this is the life I want to have." Kisame shivered. "It's a lot of pressure."

She held up a finger. He waited until she swallowed. "Have they said anything to you?" she asked.

"No. And they haven't looked at me either. But I feel it."

"Do you want to join?"

"It's complicated."

"If they're not saying anything, then don't."

"I…" He sighed. "I do want to. But like I said, it's complicated." I am not going to tell her about that text conversation yesterday morning.

"Then wait," she said. "Something will come along and make it less complicated."

He grinned. "You're a genius. That's exactly how it works."

"How has Itachi been received?"

"Oh, they're happy. He mentioned that he'd been having some doubts, but they'd disappeared. He said he felt the warm and fuzzies."

She grinned and clapped her hands. "The warm and fuzzies? That means it has to be a good idea!"

"I wonder what that feels like."

She reached across and ruffled his hair. "You'll find out."

Kisame thought while she ate. Then he was called away. It's like we're old friends. I've never had anyone ruffle my hair like that before except Itachi. Maybe she's right. Maybe I will know what it is to feel warm and fuzzy someday.

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A/N: Urrrrgh.

So then. Drink water. Sleep well. Attend to sensory needs. I'll see you all next week.