Yahiko
Yahiko lay on his back on a flat, comfortable couch. It was dark red. He looked through the glass roof at the stars. A fire burned in the fireplace behind him. The stars were swimming, and he felt at peace.
"Hey Nagato?" he asked.
"Yeah?" Nagato was suddenly sitting at the foot of the couch.
"Do you think I did the right thing?"
Nagato turned to rest one arm on the back of the couch. "Do you think you did the right thing?"
Yahiko turned that over in his mind. "I don't know."
Nagato looked up at the stars. "Well, don't worry about it." He got up and walked out of the room.
When he opened the door, laughter drifted up the stairs and into the room. Yahiko blinked, startled. He'd forgotten his sister was coming to visit! He twisted off the couch and ran down the stairs.
Hidan laughed. "Heya, Sunshine. Is this where you've been hiding? Nice place," he looked around. Yahiko closed the door behind him.
"What are you doing here? Everyone's supposed to be dead! If anyone finds out she's here, I'll be in trouble!" Yahiko's sister waved at him. He nervously waved back. She returned to braiding Hidan's hair, which was fully grown out to an appropriate length for Hidan's female form.
Hidan snorted. "What? She's good at this."
Yahiko's sister separated, gathered and twisted strands of white hair around each other with extraordinary grace. In a little over a second, she finished one braid and moved on to the next. She ran her hands through Hidan's hair appreciatively before starting. Her own hair was much like Hidan's. It was long and straight, hanging down her back and draping over her shoulder blades. Unlike Hidan, whose hair was all slicked back, she had strands framing the sides of her face too. The top of her head was much like Yahiko's, with short spikes of orange hair covering it. Her face was a little smoother than Yahiko's, and seemingly always covered with a smile. She wore the same clothes as Yahiko, and was his same height. Yahiko looked at the door nervously.
"Okay, you can be here. But only you, got it?" He had no idea how Hidan had gotten into the basement. This was the only door, and it was always locked.
"Gotcha. Me and Redhead only."
"What?!" Yahiko whirled around and noticed, for the first time, Nagato sitting at a table in the back of the room drinking tea. He met Yahiko's baffled stare with a faintly puzzled look. Yahiko turned back to the heavy wood door and put his hands against the side of his head, squeezing. "Oh no oh no oh no," he repeated softly to himself. Who else? Where else? "I am going to be in so much trouble," he whispered.
Nagato drained his cup noisily. "I like her," he announced. Yahiko's sister laughed. Yahiko looked back and was not surprised to see the two of them in the middle of a game of backgammon.
"I don't even know how to play backgammon," he whispered. Nagato threw something across a chessboard and cheered. Yahiko shifted nervously. She seemed to get along with everyone, at least. Everyone that had somehow managed to sneak their way down here. Yahiko wondered if there was a window or something that he didn't know about.
"Hey! Like my hair?" Hidan whirled around, sending his braids flying in graceful arcs. Yahiko nodded. "Good, because I'm returning the favor next."
Yahiko backed away. "Um, yeah, yeah, good luck with that," and he scurried out the door. The door blocked all noise, as if a mute button had been pressed for the whole passageway. Yahiko leaned his head back and sighed in relief.
He heard tapping, and his eyes flew open. Hidden in the darkness on the other side of the medieval dungeon-like passageway was Konan. Her foot tapped on the stone floor as she regarded him from behind some kind of red and green tapestry. The torchlight was reflected in her amber eyes. Without a word, she turned and clicked her way down the stone cobbles. She gestured out with one hand, a careless "None of my business" wave. Yahiko banged the back of his head against the door.
There was a faint knock from the inside of the door. Yahiko sighed. "I'm sorry."
On the inside of the door, there was an attempt to understand. "I don't know," Yahiko whispered. "I don't know what's going to happen. I'm scared."
Sympathy. Yahiko sighed again. "You deserve better. I don't know what I'm doing."
Amusement. Did she know what she was doing? Yahiko shook his head. No; he had to keep her safe here. It was too risky to just bet that she would make it on her own.
"I gotcha," Hidan waved at him. Hidan followed Konan down the passage. His braids shown in the torchlight long after the rest of him was invisible.
Nagato squeezed Yahiko's right hand, offering comfort and saying nothing. He leaned against the door next to Yahiko. Yahiko sighed. "Do you know?"
Nagato squeezed again. "You're not ready."
Nagato
I don't know! I just...I'm sorry…
Yahiko looked at him quizzically. "Why? Everything's beautiful." Yahiko certainly was. His hair glittered with sunshine. Against his will, Nagato was drawn forward.
"May I touch?" he asked Yahiko, who was sitting on a waist-high rock with his legs crossed.
Yahiko smiled in perfect serenity. Of course. Nagato reached out and stroked his hair. Yahiko giggled. Nagato ruffled his hair back and forth more roughly.
Yahiko leaped off the rock, giggling like a little girl. Her long hair lifted off her back and flowed through the air as she turned to face Nagato. Her eyes sparkled. But they did not sparkle the same way as Yahiko's eyes did normally. The strength in his masculine gaze hit Nagato like a solid force, but her sparkling eyes now had a light, airy quality that skipped off Nagato and disappeared. She was beautiful enough to draw, but Nagato wasn't in the mood for drawing now. He reached out for the man he'd always loved. "Come back!"
She heard far-off music and skipped away into the forest. Nagato stamped his foot, dismayed to see that his messed-up, urine-stained, filthy pants were the same. He slumped down next to the rock and called out for Yahiko. "Hello?"
"Hmm?" She looked down from the treetops where she had a butterfly perched on one finger.
"Do you know what I'm doing?" Nagato shook his head, but his hair stubbornly refused to remove itself from his face. He could hardly even see. If anyone knew what to do, this clear-eyed vision did.
Yahiko shrugged. Male or female, she was graceful always. She put her hand out and sent a butterfly softly fluttering down. Nagato reached up for it. It stopped descending beyond a certain point and fluttered past, like a stone skipping off the surface of a lake. Nagato watched it go. He sat in the shadow of the rock, watching the sunlight.
The sound of birds singing startled him. He never heard sounds in his dreams. Nagato's eyes flew open into darkness. The only light in his inside-facing room was the pale light of his cellphone going off, playing the sound of birds. He reached out clumsily, pressing the button that would make it quiet. It fell off the table into the trash can. He leaned over the edge of the bed to get it. "Ah!" He brought a leg forward to keep himself from falling off just in time. Nagato shook his head. It would be so much easier to just get out of bed.
After retrieving his phone from the garbage can, he sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his eyes, yawning. Why did I take an inside room, and not one with a window? he wondered. He really, really hoped the answer wasn't because I didn't want to have a room next to Konan's. That would be a very bad reason, considering he was trying to help her. And, if he was at all shy around her, why take a room in the same hallway in the first place? It wasn't like sharing a wall represented any special boundary or anything. Nagato decided to stop thinking about this.
He started thinking about his dream instead, and chuckled. The first part of it was embarrassing and gross, but it had ended on a pleasant note. Yahiko looked really nice as a girl. The part of Nagato that was able to use logic to reason that they were never going to get together thought it would be so much easier to be friends with her. Every other part vehemently disagreed. Nagato got up to see if Yahiko was awake.
As Nagato cracked open his own door slowly, so as to not wake anyone, a shadow stirred outside his room. He froze. It was already gone. What was that? He leaned out and looked up and down the dark hallway. There was nothing.
He tiptoed over to Yahiko's door, which was right next to his own, and cracked that open too. There was a very loud yawn from inside, and some rustling and mumbling. Nagato closed the door.
He glanced back down the hall where the shadows had moved. It was in the direction of Konan's room. The most likely answer was that she was up early, as usual. Nagato continued to stare, regardless. Something turned over in the far back of his mind and nudged at him insistently. Konan could be up and about, or there could be a ghost, demon, vampire, etc. wandering the halls of their base. He glanced down. That was silly. Wasn't it?
I can't really know for sure, and I'm already up, so I might as well. What's the worst that can happen? I meet her in the halls? Nagato looked around once, because there was no one around to see him do it, then started down toward the front of the hotel as if he was casually strolling to the kitchen for a snack. His heart was beating stronger than usual. Why was it beating so strongly?
It was probably just Konan. Nagato realized, to his surprise, that he did not fully believe that. Who else could it be? He had no idea, and that was the reason why his heart was beating fast and hard. He stopped and looked all around before turning and looking all around the cross hallway. He saw nothing in either direction, but it was dark.
Nagato crossed through the building, then looked down the hall where everyone else was. He saw nothing but closed doors, behind which lay peaceful slumberers. He opened his mouth to sigh in relief. He was crudely interrupted by the feeling of every hair on the back of his neck straining as if to tear themselves from his skin.
He took a quick, quiet breath instead and spun to the right. There was a little bit of light from the windows in the front lobby there, but still he saw nothing. Yet Nagato felt very, very sure that some kind of mysterious ninja sense had seen something. Had he caught something out of the corner of his eye, or heard a minute shuffle? He might have. I'm probably making up new things. I don't have any memory of seeing anything. There's nothing to be looking for. When this predictably failed to calm his racing heart, Nagato channeled some chakra down to his hands and readied himself. It was vastly more effective.
A full minute and a half later, the edge of Nagato's hair peered around the corner into the front lobby, followed by one cheek, then one eye. This one eye scanned the entire room as far as it was able, side to side and up to down. The sight of, who could've guessed, nothing, made his heart leap into his throat. Nagato really, really hoped he wasn't a nervous sort who could get bent out of shape over a shadow. He didn't want to think that of himself, and so there must have been something. It could be a completely innocent something, like someone up early or a draft blowing things through the air, but there was no way he could be mistaking nothing for something. If it wasn't here, that begged the question: where was it? Behind him?
No, it was not behind him. Nagato looked around again in the lobby, then ventured in for a thorough investigation. There could've been a slight draft - some papers had fallen off the disused desk - but nothing else. The entire landscape was cast in blue by the time he finished, and soon it would be light enough outside to reveal the forest's true colors. He sat on the chair behind the desk and sighed. He still hadn't found anything, but the light alone calmed his racing heart. His cheeks burned as he edged closer to admitting that maybe, just maybe, he'd been afraid of nothing after all.
He got up, stretched, and yawned. He should get back to bed before dawn fully arrived and anybody asked embarrassing questions. In the vain hope that he could find some legitimate reason why he'd been sneaking around like a scared mouse, Nagato went down the right hallway where everyone else slept first, retracing his own footsteps. He blushed harder. Forget it. I'm too worked up after fighting and seeing Yahiko wrestle a demon, that's all.
A creaking window brought him to a standstill. He stopped breathing, stopped making any sound that could get in the way of his own ears. Nagato heard it again: something squeaking. Eyes confirmed it was not a door. He rose to the tips of his toes and snuck closer, tracing the small sound to Hidan's door.
Now he sighed in relief. Oh, it was just Hidan being up early! Enjoying the morning dew, maybe? Nagato knocked on the door very softly with one knuckle, then slowly twisted the knob and entered after receiving no response.
The window latch hit the wood below with a soft thud as Hidan let it fall. He faced out the window, away from Nagato. Nagato knocked on the open door with one knuckle again. "Hey." There was no pause in Hidan's movements. The growing light outlined his shape clearly as he unzipped his cloak smoothly, took the scythe off his back smoothly, swung the scythe around where it was in danger of slicing through the ceiling smoothly, and removed his right arm from the sleeve of his cloak smoothly. It was mechanical, not like Hidan at all, and he didn't seem to have heard Nagato either time. Nagato swallowed.
"Hidan?" he whispered. "Uh, are you, really, um…" He still wasn't being heard. Hidan switched the scythe to his right hand and nearly broke the window with it as he freed his left arm. He took the cloak and, raising his left arm in front of himself, let it fall. Nagato found this to be the strangest, most troubling thing of all. Hidan had raced out to get that cloak, and showed it off every chance he wore it. Letting it fall to the floor was unexplainable. "Okay, you're acting a little stran- " That was when Hidan turned around.
Nagato's breath rushed out of him in a silent whisper of air. Hidan's eyes were dark. Too dark. Their pinkness should be visible in this light. The redness of the dark smudge above Hidan's mouth was. For the first time, it occurred to Nagato to wonder why Hidan would be outside Konan's room, in the front lobby, then sneaking back into his own room through the window. Hidan slowed to a stop as smoothly as a car rolling up to a stop sign, swiped a hand across his face to his mouth in one motion, licked, and lowered his hand. The smudge was gone. And somehow, causing Nagato's jaw to drop in disbelief although he was watching it right in front of him, Hidan's eyes brightened. Pink rose where there hadn't been pink before.
Nagato asked something incoherent and stupid. It might have been "What just happened?", or it might have been nothing but questioning noises. Either way, Hidan mumbled back something that might have been a response. It sounded a little like, "Ne uh br." Neighbor? That didn't make any sense. It didn't sound like it was one word either, maybe two or three. Hidan curled on the carpet and went to sleep with the same smoothness before Nagato could ask.
Nagato closed the door behind him very, very, quietly, then leaned with his back against it for some time. He didn't know how long. What the hell had just happened? Was that blood? Why the hell was Hidan coming back from sneaking around in the forest with blood near his mouth? Nagato's mind was very loud, though he was outwardly very quiet. He forced himself to take breaths as he needed to do and tried not to shake. What just happened?!
It occurred to Nagato that he might go back to his own room, pretend nothing had ever happened, and get all the shakes out before anyone else was awake. He did that. It was very easy to stop and appear relaxed when someone knocked on his door, and he didn't feel any urge to start again. "Come in," he said with a completely steady voice. Maybe nothing had ever happened.
Yahiko opened the door and sat down at the foot of Nagato's bed without needing to ask permission. "Hey," he greeted his best-ever friend. "So, dream of anything interesting?"
"Yeah," Nagato answered. It was customary to want to tell a friend about a crazy dream that one has had. To ask for a dream story from someone who one has no reason to suspect of being psychic would be...strange. Yahiko would probably tell him why he was asking in due time. Yahiko had no secrets from him. "I dreamed of asking you for advice, and you being reassuring but not really giving me any."
Yahiko's jaw worked up and down several times. Why would he be surprised to hear that? "I dreamed of that too," he answered. It was Nagato's turn to be surprised. He - me? What would he ever need advice about? He has so much figured out that I don't.
"So…" Yahiko looked to the side shyly. Nagato leaned forward to finally hear the reason why he was being asked about dreams. "So, um…" Confusion passed over Yahiko's face. It was the look of figuring out how to phrase something. Nagato waited patiently.
"How did you dream of me?" Yahiko finally asked. He looked up to Nagato's eye like he was frightened. Why? I don't even know what he's asking…
Nagato struggled to remember anything that could conceivably be relevant. "Um, we were in the forest, and it was sunny. You were sitting somewhere, all calmly. Then you were happy and ran off with butterflies, or something. You were dancing, or maybe it was just like you were. I dreamed of you being happy and peaceful, that's all."
"Oh. Okay. Nothing else? Um...weird? Unusual?"
"No." What is he asking me about? Why? Is something going on?
Yahiko shuffled. "Okay, then," he giggled. "I was just wondering…"
"About what?"
Yahiko shrugged, poorly. "Something I saw in my dream, that's all. You were, like, there, and I was strange, and it was really weird that you didn't seem like you even noticed. It was one of those weird dream things, I don't even know why I'm asking about it. Nevermind."
Nagato tilted his head. He was completely confused. Hidan was acting freaky, and Yahiko was asking him strange things. Why? Was something happening? Were they okay? He raised a hand and felt for Yahiko's temperature.
Yahiko blinked, then laughed. It was a natural laugh. He pushed Nagato's hand away. "I'm not sick! I wouldn't come here if I was. Besides, you're not my mom." He giggled again. Nagato smiled. Everything was alright.
"Do you think it's weird?" Yahiko asked. He shuffled around so he could sit cross-legged, and leaned forward. "Big battle, big party, fighting. And now it's all just another work day. How am I ever going to stock racks like nothing happened?"
Nagato started to laugh uncontrollably. If he could tell anyone, he could tell Yahiko. It was hilarious now! "I woke up really early, when you were still asleep, and saw a shadow move. You should have seen me, sneaking around like a mouse about to have a heart attack! I thought it could be another demon," he explained. He wiped his eyes for spare tears and let out another few giggles. "It was just Hidan." That brought his laughter to a stop fast.
Yahiko shivered. "To be fair, he and Konan can be kind of scary when they're trying to be quiet, and I've been looking around for ghosts ever since they met that demon boy. No judgment here."
"Ghosts?"
"I don't like the idea of being spied on." Huh. He doesn't? Nagato had never known that before. He almost wanted to ask why, but didn't. It could be something private.
Yahiko looked around with a frown. "Speaking of, did you see how tired she was yesterday after being paper all the time? I think she's still asleep. She must be really tired."
Nagato nodded. "I would be too, after racing around for most of the past week. If I'd been doing that and I hadn't passed out at just the right time, I'd have fallen down midstep somewhere. She did pass out at just the right time, but I still have no idea how she managed."
"You think she'd mind if I made her breakfast?" Yahiko asked.
"No, that'd be great! Hidan went back to sleep after all that, but he'll probably be awake by then. You could leave it with him."
Yahiko unfolded his legs and hopped off the bed. "I'll go do that, then. See you round."
Nagato swung himself off the bed to follow. He wasn't sure how he felt about Hidan being awake by then. Man up. I'll have to ask him just what the hell he was doing sometime, so I should get it over with. He still nervously chewed the inside of his cheeks. On his way past Konan's door, he couldn't help but glance sideways. That was a mystery still unsolved. And what was he doing outside Konan's door?
Deidara
Nobody wanted to wake Deidara from his deep slumber, so he was left out of the mutual commiserating that everyone else participated in while Yahiko cooked breakfast.
"Anyone else feel weird about going back to a normal day after yesterday?" Yahiko asked after the third person came in to ask what he was cooking, why, and could they have some. Thus started a chain of agreement, where everyone affirmed that yes, the ordinary working day seemed somehow different. Kisame grumbled something about his job feeling less interesting than it ever had before. Samehada chirred agreement, though that was probably because he wouldn't have any more cool stories to listen to. Itachi admitted that the thought of being free and out in the open, formerly a good thing, now sent shivers up his spine.
Sasori opened his mouth to chime in, and came to a life-altering realization. The floor seemed to broaden somehow. His mouth still open, he looked around at everyone else as if at a great distance. Yahiko, with a worried voice, asked why. Sasori worked his jaw around, trying to force the truth out past disbelief, shock and not a small amount of denial.
"Fighting the succubus yesterday made my job better. It made everything better," he whispered.
Sasori sat back, trying to ponder how that could possibly be true and getting nowhere. Somehow, it just was. Everybody else that had fit themselves into the kitchen looked just as surprised as he did. Nobody knew what to say to that.
Then Hidan poked his head in. "Hey, assholes! How yall doing? Anything cool? What is that and why does it smell so good?"
Something unsettling happened in the kitchen at that time. Nothing afterwards could be quite the same as before, whether anyone there recognized it or not. Deidara and Konan missed it, and Kakuzu was already quite familiar with it so he was just gratified to see that everyone else felt the same. As for everyone else, their previously established image of Hidan took a strong blow when they realized that really, truly, Hidan's experiences the previous day had genuinely not changed a single thing about how he felt, or thought, or acted at all.
"You must feel at least a little nervous. Imagine going into the bar again. I recall some mention of a hive. You could be hurt again, at any time, with nobody to rescue you," Itachi envisioned.
"Your soul popped free of your body and touched," Sasori added.
"You can turn into a girl now!" Yahiko contributed. "Isn't that special? Different?"
Hidan smacked himself on the forehead for forgetting to wear his cloak. Without a shirt, he couldn't transform in front of people. However, to answer their other questions, turning into a girl was awesome but not really different from any other fun thing, having his soul touched was a complete nonissue, and it would be really really fun if he went to the bar and met a lot of demons. "Fuck, I have so many questions now," he whispered, with his eyes shining in awe. "How do they feel about, like...everything? They must have so much to work through."
He proceeded to bounce up and down, and would have ran to grab his cloak and go down to the bar right that second. But just before he would have done so, it sunk in for Yahiko that he was really going to do that, because he really had no more fear or caution than he'd ever had, and Yahiko remembered to ask him to stay so Konan could have breakfast when she woke up. Hidan agreed readily, and looked forward to talking about cool things with Konan. Samehada licked at his arm uncertainly. Hidan tasted normal…
Kakuzu made a big show of shrugging and shaking his head as if to say, What can you do? From this, everyone else in the room understood Hidan was always like this. How? What? Why? Hidan was confused by their confusion and clarified that it wasn't a big deal, it was someone being unhappy and angry, why was everyone so worried? By the time they broke up and left for their various duties, only one thing had been made clear: Hidan wasn't normal.
Nagato was the last to go off, staying behind to ask Hidan just what the hell had happened this morning and where the blood had come from. Hidan looked very confused and mentioned some problems Kakuzu had said he had with sleepwalking, before wandering away to see if Konan was awake. He left the redhead with his jaw hanging open. What the hell kind of sleepwalking put blood on someone's face?!
At the time he was wondering this, Deidara's eyes were starting to squeeze in his room. Dei moved his fingers on his right hand as Kisame told Samehada to hang out at home (again) today. He yawned while Samehada groused in a corner, starting to get bored with hanging around other people all day while his favorite person played with his former tankmates. Hidan listened closely, determined that Konan was not even close to being awake, and put her breakfast in an enclosed container. Deidara groaned as the final side of the lid snapped shut. Finally, the place was all quiet. He continued to lay sprawled out over his bed, not moving, not even thinking. He drifted in the pure sensation of rest.
Eventually, it began to drift away from him. He tried to hold onto it, but trying to do anything only made it go faster. Deidara opened his eyes reluctantly. "Urrrrgh." He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Only then did he realize how quiet it was.
"Hm?" He got out of bed too quickly and stumbled to the left of the door. He worked his way right, tried to recover his balance, and successfully left his room. Hidan was outside, looking for him. Konan's door was closed.
Dei opened his mouth to ask Hidan where everyone was, but he was grabbed, shushed, and dragged to the kitchen before he could. "She's still sleeping. Super tired from yesterday," Hidan explained. "How ya doing, blondie?"
"Me too," Deidara yawned. "Where is everyone?"
"Already left," Hidan said with a shrug. "But I was there for some of what they were talking about before, if you want to hear it."
Dei blinked away mild surprise. When was the last time he'd overslept this much? But after how tired he'd been yesterday, he couldn't claim real surprise. He nodded. "Yeah, shoot."
"Yahiko cooked breakfast." Hidan indicated the container on the counter he was leaning against. "For Konan, so we shouldn't have any. It smelled delicious, too. How the fuckits is that guy still single?"
Deidara was startled by an unpleasant thought. "What if it's because his original was, yeah?"
Hidan scratched his head. "She said we kinda have their personalities, so we could kinda have their relationships too. Makes sense."
The thought that such an amount of his life had been decided by someone else was still sending shivers up Deidara's spine. How could Hidan be so cool about something like that? Dei tried to remember everything that had led to him and Sasori being friends. It was all natural...right? But for Yahiko, it wasn't. He felt extremely bad on his orange-haired friend's behalf. "Damn, yeah."
"Yeah…" Hidan's eyes grew misty. "That is fucking suckish. Shit."
Deidara shook his head. "He seems pretty happy anyway, so I guess he's okay. What happened while I was sleeping, yeah?"
"So, he was cooking breakfast, everyone came in to see if they could have some, and they talked about something. I don't know what it was, because I only showed up at the end. That's when they ganged up on me to try and make me agree that the world was suddenly all scary and changed and shit just because we fought a demon yesterday!" Hidan crossed his arms and scowled. "What the shit does something like that have to do with today? They think I'll treat going to the bar any differently now? Why the fuck would I do that?"
"Um, you ended up in a lot of pain from going to the bar, yeah," Deidara pointed out the obvious.
"So? It didn't hurt. Who cares?"
Deidara's mind was clicking at nearly its full potential, but that was not remotely fast enough to make any sense of Hidan's words. Pain is hurting. That's the definition of it. What? He repeated this out loud, hoping for an explanation that made sense.
"No it's not." Hidan stood up straight and held up two hands. To his left hand, he said, "This is hurting. It's when something is broken and you can't do things as well as before." To his right hand, Hidan said, "This is pain. It's a reaction to hurting, or sometimes joy, or great things like running. A little of it feels fantastic, a lot can cause hurting by keeping you from moving or anything." He put his hands down. "Shit yes, that was painful, but I am exactly as capable of anything as I was before. Even when I had a whole elephant of a hangover, it didn't really hurt. It did start to, but I knocked myself out so I was fine. Get it?"
It made half-sense to Deidara. That meant he could almost make sense of it, but then the tenuous train of logic he was trying to build fall apart before it got there. Dei could not tell if Hidan's words were very wise or very bizarre. He held onto one part that was definitely bizarre. "How do you knock yourself out when you have a hangover, hm?"
"Thinking hurt, so I thought about things a lot until it hurt enough to knock me out," Hidan chirped. "If you ask how I thought of that, the answer is that I can think without really thinking, going through the back channels if you will. It was only, like, thinking with the conscious part of my brain that hurt."
"You're making my head hurt," Deidara complained. "Can't you just say intuition or something, hm?"
"There's a word for it?" Hidan exclaimed. "I'll go look it up. Thanks!"
He paused, looking somewhere above Deidara's head and tilting his own head quizzically. "She's awake," he murmured. "Uf. Feels like such a letdown. Of...everything."
True enough, Deidara could see his eyes dim and eyelids start to droop as Hidan talked. Yikes. What kind of thing could he be picking up from her? "So, um…" Deidara started.
"You stay here, bring her food in fifteen minutes or something. I'm gonna be outside," Hidan muttered as he pushed himself off of the counter. He swayed a little, and looked pale like he might be ill.
Ill? Hey-! Deidara tapped Hidan on the shoulder before he could leave. "Hey, I just remembered! Do you actually remember anything of that big talk we had at the party? You left and said it didn't feel like you would remember, yeah."
Hidan stared back and shook his head. Deidara was disappointed. Then Hidan opened his mouth and said, "Jesus. Other world. Big shit. Ugh, I felt like shit. How did I manage to remember? Who fucking knows." He shook his head again before leaving. Deidara was joyed at this pleasant surprise.
Dei pulled out his phone, figured out how to work the timer app, and set it for ten minutes. He wondered what he could do for ten minutes. Read? Not enough time. Sit around? Boring. Do pushups or something? Hey...we have training rooms. Deidara's eyes lit up like he had a lightbulb behind them. In all the chaos, nobody had gone to see or use those rooms since that first day! Deidara rushed down to see what Hidan and Konan had done with the place. Hadn't they said something about it?
Ten seconds later, Deidara's alarm went off to tell him that somehow, minutes had passed. It didn't feel like it. Deidara still stared in slackjawed fascination at the right training room. Holy crap, how did they do all this? And why? It looks like they let a bored toddler loose in here and put targets in after he was done, yeah. But it works…!
Deidara shook his head. How many more minutes had just passed? He should get Konan her breakfast already. He turned his back to the room, and put his hands at the sides of his eyes like horse blinders so he wouldn't be tempted to turn back and stay there for the entire day. He would lock himself in there if that was what he had to do, but maybe not today. Things to do, people to feed. Bored toddlers to visit.
He hoped Konan was okay.
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