#Alembic scorpion?

[childoftheriver]

Happy 50th birthday to “Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends”!

[brouzoufgainer]

[Silence. There is a noise as if an immense wheel were turning and moving the air. A hurricane separates them. At the same time, two Stars are seen colliding and from them fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if falling in a vacuum: then three scorpions one after another and finally a frog and a beetle which come to rest with desperate slowness, nauseating slowness] - The Spurt of Blood, Antonin Artaud

[forbidden-sorcery]

World’s end is not a threat from the pulpit, we have assembled it with dextrous and sinistrous fingers, bunkered our oblivion for the days of the final division of plunder now at hand. We will not follow the smoke to the stars until we are burned on the pyre of the earth. Love is the war to end all wars, and the war is upon us. While our culture laments, what have we done wrong? Has no concept of sin, but only consumption. It still knows that something is going dreadfully awry. Infantilised it helplessly repeats, what, what have we done wrong? It is simple: Mankind has broken the covenant with nature. Dee and the alchemists knew this, and sought to coax from their alembics a gentler reconciliation, an harmonious counterchange of the elements cross-matched. That window has closed. There is no gold that will buy us freedom from our fate, we are more fearsomely tasked. As our vaunted technological sophistication hits built-in obsolescence it is the deceptively simple acts and tools of witchcraft that will endure. I would trust my black-handled knife longer than my laptop. If more high magicians had, like Paracelsus, listened to the folk practitioners rather than their vanity we would perhaps not be at this point. Yet we are. We must recognise that we are the horsemen that sheet upon the winds. We the angels pouring poison vials. We the seal breakers. We the elders of days revolving around an empty throne. We the daughters of Jerusalem, the Kings of Edom, the Cains and Liliths, the scorpion men. Before we turn our deserving ire on the class of the super-rich and their marauding corporations we must recognise that we too are the consumers. Our actions have added to the weight of disenchantment. We have let this happen. The rape of the earth is about to enter a horrifying final phase where the last wildernesses are despoiled for the last resources.

Peter Grey - Apocalyptic Witchcraft

[kaknzn]

My contribution for KakuHida Week! Theme: Crossover!

@kakuhidaweek

                                    ♥ Hidan had been grown on the stories of the gods. He’d learned from a young age not to cross fairy circles, and the importance of a name. Hidan had been taught incantation, and he had been given the talent to use it. His often overflowing home with baubles, beakers, brewing cauldrons, and old leather bound books spoke back to a time where he had been much younger.

                                   ♥

Full Fic Under the Cut or Read it on Ao3 Or DeviantART!

Hidan had been grown on the stories of the gods. He’d learned from a young age not to cross fairy circles, and the importance of a name. Hidan had been taught incantation, and he had been given the talent to use it. His often overflowing home with baubles, beakers, brewing cauldrons, and old leather bound books spoke back to a time where he had been much younger. A beautiful witch with white hair and eyes like asters, she had taken him out to her garden and shown him the little people under the leaves of the pumpkin plants.

“Brownies,” his mother told him with a giggle. “They don’t like to be noticed, hush,” she put her finger to her lips, and he had watched with wide eyes and an open mouth while they pulled weeds and carted them away. These little people built their furniture from his discarded toys, fixed his broken crafts, and kept his messy room immaculate. All they ever seemed to want from him was a bowl of cream, and a little sugar. The day they left, Hidan had missed them, and looked in their tiny home to find all of the lost and shiny trinkets that they had felt valuable enough to keep. As he touched the cool surface of a marble with his little finger, he came to the realization that things discarded could still be of great significance.

His mother had taught him when he was young that humans were not the only things with two legs that walked their earth; sometimes creatures of many legs, feet, paws, and abundant hands were behind the shadows enmasse if you looked for them. They knew about kindness in an intimate way that humans just could not always grasp. His mom had told him about a great many things before she died. When she was young, and living at the edge of the woods, often her gardens bloomed brightest when she had opened her gates to the lost and wandering spirits on the road.

“Be careful with spirits Hidan. They’re tricky things sometimes. There are all manner of things in this world that will lead you down paths winding through the wilds, and you’ll never come back home again.” She told him.

‘It sounds like exactly where I want to be,’ he’d thought to himself, grasping the pendant on his chest. The inverted triangle within a protective circle, denoted in silver, and gifted to him from a man that reached down to him through the red rain. Hidan knew more than most about spirits, gods, and demons. He had been loved by things ghosted away by the wind, and loved things in return in a way that made them dwindle and die. Hidan had a hand of death, and things he tried to grow would wilt away. When he was in his mid twenties he found he was not a human at all; shinigami were not often born of the earth, but it seemed Hidan was different. Because of this, humans were dangerous to care about, he’d learned. Things that died after a handful of tens of years were just not for him.

With thunder that would roll like roiled waves on the ocean, and clouds that took the shapes of many reaching hands from hades, Jashin had plucked this boy from the edge of his home and loved him. He’d taught him that he was on the edge of life and death itself. His mother had given him the gift to walk the line of shinigami. Through the eyes of a god, Hidan learned what life and death meant. He had seen vast expanses of trees at the beginning of time, and he had seen old and crumbling train stations, he’d learned about doors to nowhere, and passages out of time.

Jashin had blessed him. His mother had taught him. And Kakuzu would _test him._

In the peak of one of the hottest summers Hidan had ever encountered in his many long years, he’d had to deal with an abundance of humans coming down into his valley outside of Safflower city. They brought him offerings of bread (home-made), stones, wreaths, and even money. They all had their complaints about the heat-- surely it had to be an angering of spirits, they complained. From his experience, spirits didn’t mess around turning up the heat of an entire city unless they had a serious vendetta. As long as he’d lived on the outskirts of Safflower, never had he seen anything more than wanderers and witches. There were gnomes aplenty, and sometimes trolls, and deer with human faces, but he’d never seen anything powerful enough to turn up the sun. Some time ago, they’d even gotten their own resident witch.

Oh-- that definitely had been some time ago. They’d left behind their familiar in their passing as well. The cat had made his home in Hidan’s, chasing brownies and mice. While Hidan listened to the woes of the human from the city, Scorpion, the old ginger tom-cat would hop himself up into the window to turn his yellow eyes up to the crystalline webs of spiders. So long as Scorp was calm, Hidan found he didn’t need to be suspicious of the people in his home.

It wasn’t until a priest, Deidara, came to his small stretch of land, that Scorp arched his back and hissed, his fur bristling harshly and his claws making lines in the dirt. The little people in his pumpkin patch scurried away. The soot sprites in the door of his home cowered back and dropped their stones and herbs. Hidan clicked his tongue with a tsk as their spell came undone in the presence of a priest. Often magic that used ingredients from the shadows couldn’t stand up against holy men, but something didn’t seem quite right.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the priest said, his blond hair falling down over his shoulders as it had been picked up by a rare and fleeting breeze. “I’ve brought you something for lunch, hm. Do you mind if we have a chat?” If sunshine were a man, he was certain it was standing before Hidan. That much spiritual light made him squint a little, but he found his stomach unable to resist the smell of basil and pumpernickel. His mouth practically watered from the thought of aged cheese on soft and fluffy bread.

“Sure. I could eat-- talk. I have time to talk,” he stuttered, gathering himself up into a more formal posture. Hidan ran a hand through his hair and beckoned the priest into his home. “Pruinae,” he whispered to the rune in his doorway, and frosty wind chased the heat out of the walls and through the open window. Scorp followed at Hidan’s ankles and grumbled a hiss out at the priest that had crouched down to offer affection with an outstretched hand.

The inside of Hidan’s home was well kept, even if it took him a good ten minutes of rearranging the alembics, beakers, and cauldrons of various broiling substances and sizzling spells to get room for lunch on the table. Some reacted more violently than others to the presence of the holy man-- a simpler spell for a cleaning sprite tried to climb up his arm, and Hidan could feel himself bristle with the raw energy against his skin. It felt like his hair was standing on end as he hastily brushed the spell back into the jar it belonged in and shoved a cork in it.

“What brings you out into the valley? Are you here to bullshit me about spirits making it hot?”

“No, hm,” the priest sat down at the table, disappointed that the cat wanted nothing to do with him. He pulled out a loaf of bread and set it in front of him, and proceeded to slice up pieces of cheese, along with tomato. He unpackaged some meat from the butcher, and hummed a little tune as he worked. Hidan pulled open his cupboards as he listened to Deidara’, his finger running along the labels of several bottles.

“This is going to sound a little strange, hm.”

“I doubt it,” Hidan said under his breath. He pulled a bottle of bubbling red liquid from the shelf. Inside the glass confines, it swirled with a certain glimmer that was strongly reminiscent of blood; Hidan pulled the cork with his teeth, and spat it into his hand. He paused for a second to inhale the deep scent of raspberry and wild cherries. The bottle overflowed with an ethereal mist, and Hidan poured two glasses of the sanguine appearing liquid.

“The church, I think, is haunted by a demon.”

“What--?!” Hidan nearly dropped his glasses, fumbling with the bottle in the process. Without enough arms to hold it all, the liquid careened toward the floor. “Vitae; luculentam et bene servetur,” he commanded, and before it could stain his carpet, Hidan told the liquid to lift itself and tidy back into the glasses. With his teeth on edge, he set one glass in front of Deidara with an unimpressed scowl.

“And why the fu-- why are you, a priest, coming to me about your church?” Hidan could almost be offended. It was massively a conflict of interest to him to deal with anything including christian churches. They were new in the area, to him, and all they seemed to do was sew a seed of stigma against spirits, gods, and the beyonds. “Isn’t that kind of your domain, HM? Isn’t it your job to keep your ground consecrated and demon free or something? In fact, I remember last year when I came to help out one of your flock and I couldn’t get past the threshold!”

“Are you mocking my speech impediment, hm?”

“I don’t know, are you mocking my craft, HM?” Hidan drank straight from the bottle of red liquid, a line of it dripping down his chin as he kept eye contact with the less than enthused priest at his table. Deidara blinked slowly and offered a piece of buttered bread out to Hidan.

“No… Actually, I’m serious. It started at the beginning of summer, yeah,” Deidara looked thoughtful, chewing his lunch as he cast his eyes heavenward. “I guess I started noticing something wasn’t right when the statues started to cry.”

“The statues?” Hidan asked impassively.

“Yeah hm. It was like the whole room got chilly and filled with this deep and grim sadness. It’s hard to describe.”

“THAT was the first thing you noticed?”

“Yeah.”

Hidan bit the inside of his cheek and wondered sometimes just how blind humans really were to the endeavors of the other realms.

“You can’t get rid of it because?”

“Well can you keep a secret?” Deidara leaned in and adjusted one of his sleeves up to the hem of his white glove.

“Like a vault,” Hidan replied, and leaned forward on his elbows, bread forgotten for the bits of juicy gossip. Truthfully, he’d been skeptical of Deidara since he came to the city some time ago. How long ago had that even been? It had to have been years by now.

“I’m not really a priest,” Deidara revealed. “I didn’t even believe in ghosts until it started messing with the statues and the bibles--” Hidan could tell he was at least partially lying. “--Ripping them to shreds hm. Well see, the priest that lived there before-- he kind of entrusted the church to me and I really owed him one.”

“Jashin help me,” Hidan muttered under his breath. He placed his face in his hands and prayed for strength from his own god. “This city is full of blasphemers and heathens. No respect for the sanctity of death.” The holy light emitted by a false priest; it was no wonder a familiar wanted nothing to do with Deidara.

“You’re so bad at your damn job your church is haunted by a demon,” Hidan told Deidara firmly. “You should retire,” he spat, then stood up and grabbed what looked like an old farmer’s sickle from a rack beside his door. He knew the grip of the handle like an old friend, and it thrummed in tune with him with the voice of a lover, too intimate with carnage. Though it looked like an old sickle now, when the circumstances were right, it would reveal its true form for Hidan, and they would reap whatever stood before them.

Hidan didn’t care for demons. They were a nasty lot, tricky like the fae, and self serving without remorse for fiendish actions. Hidan had cleansed his share of demons that were more trouble than they were worth. This sounded like a petty little thing looking for any sort of attention it could get. What better way to stir up a ruckus than to haunt a church? It likely wasn’t even a demon at all. Just a wayward spirit without anything better to do.

Hidan walked out passed the garden and looked down the road to the city. Beyond the buildings, he could see dark clouds gathering and building into towers of cotton grey. The heat of the day had broken to a chilly wind that rolled the grass. Even the brownies had taken shelter. Perhaps he was wrong.

As he attached his scythe to his back, the phony priest appeared in his doorway again, looking out toward the gathering anger in the sky.

“Demons aren’t really so bad it seems, hm,” Deidara sighed. “It’s just starting to freak people out n’ all. I dunno. I asked it to leave and that made everything worse.”

“Of course it did, you have no idea what you’re doing. You could have got yourself cursed you know? The gods of death aren’t very forgiving to people who pretend to be what they’re not and scam others. seriously,” Hidan snapped. Maybe he was getting a little old and a little tired of humans assuming they knew what was best for things that were out of their control.

“Oh it’s far too late for that. We all have our own curses to bear.”

“Don’t you mean “Crosses”?” Hidan asked, one of his brows lifting quizzically.

Deidara shook hands with Hidan, a tongue darting out of his palm to lick between Hidan’s fingers, sending a shiver up his spine that made him want to leave his corporeal form behind.

“I don’t think I do,” Deidara whispered back to Hidan, who became further unnerved when something underneath Deidara’s shirt giggled at him.

---

Wild in his frenzy, Kakuzu stalked toward the doors of the church and hissed when his skin began to fade into translucent obscurity. Parts of him became the floating specs of dust in the sunlight, dispersing to settle on the pews. After thousands of years of being in power, it had come down to the last of his temples crumbling to ruin. The last place he had to call home had been destroyed in an earthquake that cast it down into the ocean. The scripture in scrolls, the remaining gold coins, all of his treasured belongings and books had been washed into the sea. There wasn’t a soul left who remembered the name of the god of knowledge. It had been reclaimed by the earth that gave rise to him.

How ironic.

The way humans had advanced, they didn’t need to commune with the other side about their history. There were paleontologists, anthropologists, scientists, artists; there were libraries, there were computers and phones. Somehow in the busyness of the chaotic growth of humans, they had taken claim over his domain of learning and teaching, and had lost his name to history. Kakuzu had lived through the tragedy of book burnings, and the way humans stole and coveted knowledge like greedy little gremlins reaching for coins in the muck. They didn’t need him anymore. And how it hurt to be left behind in a world so full of knowledge. There was so much for even him to learn, and he would never get to see it.

Forgotten, his form was fading.

Desperately, Kakuzu waved his hand in front of a patron of the church and watched her shiver and close the window to return to reading her bible. And how his heart soared to watch her faith grow the more she learned. It was beautiful to see someone learn their passion for the first time, and so he stood there and savored the moment, as it likely would be one of his last times he would get to see someone discover a subject they loved.

What was truly in a name?

He could barely remember it himself. When he said it aloud at night, it felt like a lie coming off his tongue. The void in his chest would get bigger, and Kakuzu would shiver as he felt himself fading away. It had been 200 years since he’d been able to speak to anyone. That particular morning, Kakuzu was so violently frustrated with his own oncoming death that his sorrow had made the statues weep. The congregation before jesus on the cross had gasped and thought it a terrible sight. The panic raising in the crowd of their voices, he felt the sting in the unknown. He could help them understand. Kakuzu tried to reach out to the people fleeing through the doors, and became horrified as a child ran right through him, leaving a chill in his stomach.

Eventually the woman in the pews left, and he was left alone again peering out the stained glass windows. The holy ground he stood upon could only fuel the flickering fire in his soul for so long before it would be put out. He was just another light in the dark becoming smoke. He had minutes left.

Eventually even stars had to die.

His body had come unstrung, and the strings of fate inside of him spilled out onto the stone, dying as they touched the ground. His essence was gone, and Hidan found him there, weeping over the loss of his ability to perform miracles. Lost, alone, and angry-- how dare they call him a demon? He’d given them everything. He’d given them the word “history” and watched them grow.

“It’s not very often I get to witness the death of a god,” Hidan said sympathetically, and planted himself on the floor beside the threads that lost their gold, withered to grey, and melted into dust.

“You’re--” Kakuzu croaked, his voice drying with the efforts to sustain his form. “A shinigami, yeah. Don’t worry. I haven’t gotten your name or anything. I don’t think I’m supposed to collect your soul. Just a complaint from the local rabble about some crying statues.”

“You can--”

“I can see you just fine. You’re in a bit of a sorry state though. What’s your name?”

Kakuzu felt hope soar through him and he opened his mouth to speak but found… he had no memory of it. His name died on the tip of his tongue, and Hidan scowled looking up at the obnoxious cross and man that towered over them. Not fair. Everyone knew who Jesus was. Everyone knew Death. Everyone knew Fate. But that was how the world worked. When gods were forgotten, they died. It had meant that not even the gods had left this one to perish.

“Why are you here then?” Hidan asked, and set his hand on Kakuzu’s back.

“I have nowhere else,” he confessed. “When I try to leave… it hurts.”

“You’re prolonging the inevitable,” Hidan said sternly, but it garnered no response from the form before him. He’d always been taught about the importance of accepting death, but then, he’d never had to be on the other end of his scythe. He’d only ever been the one to take the hands of the dying and help them reach out to the spirits on the other side. Death was always tragic, and abundant. How many hands of starving wartorn children had he held and watched the fireflies with?

It was different when a god died. They didn’t have an afterlife, they didn’t exist with the same rules as humans did, as a soul within a body. They were whole, and holy. There was no physical or spiritual barrier. This was their before, their present, their after. There would be no second chances, no heaven, no hell. Hidan was at the crux of the end of something ancient, and he had no words of wisdom to make it any easier.

“What god were you?” He asked quietly, and watched the light inside of Kakuzu slowly die away.

“I don’t remember,” Kakuzu replied and looked glumly at his hand as it disappeared. What a miserable way to die. Something inside of Hidan made him inhale his anger and choke on it. The sorrow in the room was palpable, and that’s what he blamed for the welling of tears in his eyes that gathered on his cheeks, and dared to slide down and drip off his chin. His heart would break for this dying god. This would be him one day. Would his death be this lonely too? The injustice of this death made him want to defy everything that he had been taught about the definite line that everyone had to cross. Why would fate send a reaper without the order to collect?

His attention was drawn to the corner of the room, where the floorboards were parted to give way to something living, coming up from the soil beneath the church. How stubborn nature was to defy the constructs of the people around it. There had been a time when the forests had revolted so violently against the settlement of humans. The gods then had died to defend a home that gave way to an uncertain future. There were paths at times even that lead to hungry towns that ate souls because they couldn’t have one, where nature was so angry about being taken over that it tried to claim the lives around it back. The clash of human and nature had led to a lot of evil, and to Hidan it seemed truly evil that this entity wept beside him, nearly alone.

Like the dandelion cutting through the floorboards, this god was stubbornly alive, clinging to the last spark of himself.

“So there is death, there also is life,” a voice in the back of his head reminded him. He couldn’t stand it anymore.Being unafraid of taking risks is what had made Hidan good at his job in the first place. He decided to reach into the depths of the dying god beside him with fingers outstretched and yearning to touch that dying light. His hand slipped through the god’s back, into his chest, and found the tiny doomed glow inside of him.  

The god’s soul looked like an ocean.

It wasn’t something Hidan was expecting, to open his eyes again and look up through the waves of rippling light as pages sank through the water to disappear into the pit below. Above him, a school of little red fish swam passed; the daughters of the moon, as beautiful as ever. Somewhere in the vast, and cold unknown of the unexplored, there had to be a name.

‘What is your name?’ He asked into the darkness, though his voice came from his heart, not his throat.

‘I don’t know,’ the darkness replied, and an eerie stillness came over the sun illuminated waves. It wanted him to move toward the surface, but the surface was not where names were kept. As he did with so much of his life, Hidan gripped his scythe and walked down a path into darkness. Like his mother warned him, letting his essence into the soul of a dying god was an endeavor he might not return from. If the god died before Hidan could rescue his name, they would die together. It was a risk he was willing to take.

‘You need to tell me, it’s the only way I can help you,’ Hidan pushed deeper, finding the water give way to smoke and choking flames. This must have been when humanity had started to forget him.

‘They burned my libraries.’ A voice wept.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Hidan replied.

‘I let them.’

‘You loved them. You wanted them to love you too.’

‘They didn’t. Facts aren’t kind.’ That was true. Humanity didn’t like facts.

Hidan frowned and pushed through the smoke. It was no wonder that the ocean was so dark. Humans craved knowledge, but they didn’t care where it came from. This god had found his love in the pages of books, in the light of people learning. He’d become rich in the bounties of their discoveries. Over time, they stopped thanking him. They became ungrateful. The smarter people got, the more ignorant they truly grew sometimes.

Hidan continued forward, backward through history. He watched as whales above his head became larger and more profound. Creatures swam beneath him that had been dead for millions of years. There were gates that no longer opened, realms that no longer existed, Hidan balked at how ancient this god was. The tragedy of his fading into obscurity compounded the colder the ocean became around him. Before there were people, before consciousness, the original gods that had put the worlds together and opened up realms between creatures. This god was never born of another. He was an original. An offspring of the universe. He was timeless, turning to dust in a church with a phony priest.

When Hidan finally walked through the stars at the bottom of the ocean, he found the lonely soul with shackles around his wrists of self made doubt. They weighed him down in a place without light, where he couldn’t see his own accomplishments. There were no living creatures down here aside from the drowning boy who looked toward the surface of the water. It was clear that not only had he been forgotten by history, he had been alone long before the birth of humanity. He loved them for the curious creatures they were, bringing order to chaos. They had not loved him in return.

He had just been too much chaos for them to explain.

“What is your name?” Hidan asked one more time, his voice breaking the silence like the eruption of time itself. The stillness of the water echoed back silence as Hidan’s purple eyes stubbornly kept the gaze of the god’s green ones. Hidan could read his lips and--

And suddenly Hidan opened his eyes. Whole, and in his arms, sinking against the warmth of his affection, the god trembled at the feeling of being truly alive again.

“Your name is Kakuzu, and you are the god of knowledge,” Hidan proclaimed. “And as long as even one person knows your name, you can’t die. I won’t let you.”

---

Scorp liked Kakuzu. There still weren’t very many beings that could perceive his presence, Scorpion was one of them. Hidan had grown used to the way that Kakuzu stared at him while he read. Three weeks had passed since the incident where he had touched Kakuzu’s soul, and he was trying to ignore the way he smirked whenever he caught Kakuzu staring. He spent a long time looking at Kakuzu too. The way he wrote down little notes for things he learned, the way he helped bumble bees off the hot stone paths. There was so much love in one creature, it was a wonder to Hidan that this god presided over something as cold and technical as knowledge.

But then… Hidan had learned that there were different kinds of knowledge. There was wisdom, selective, competitive, fictional, non fictional, and the world was so vast that the possibilities were boundless. Sometimes, Kakuzu would love something new so much that wind would pick up around him and turn the pages of all his books, and knock over ink bottles and potted plants. It would ruffle Scorps fur, and he would blink contentedly before stretching his back and moving somewhere with a little more sun.

Hidan had a plan. If there was one thing he was good at, it was being obnoxious. There was a reason he lived out in a valley outside of the city, and it wasn’t for HIS peace of mind, that was for damn sure. As loud mouthed as ever, Hidan put together an informational pamphlet which could be described as a spiritual resume, he thought. He took these into the city every day, to any place that looked like it could use a little more help in the smarts department. (He’d crammed several fistfulls of these fliers into Deidara’s mailbox: “Have you heard of the god of knowledge?”)

Toting his fliers in a messenger bag, with his unimpressed little cat peeking his head out amongst the envelopes, Hidan faithfully delivered these to every house that would open their door.

“Good morning. Can I have just a minute of your time? Have you heard about the god of knowledge? No-- oh, no it’s not a religion. I’m just trying to help him out. No I’m not crazy. Well fuck you too buddy, have a nice day.” He waited until he heard the fading of footsteps, and scratched a pixie rune into the door. The jerks would be coming to him in a week. Tops.

Inevitably, this strategy worked. He had more business than he’d had in years, paying off the pixies to leave people alone after he’d sufficiently talked their ear off about Kakuzu. He talked at length about how the guy had helped humankind since they were tiny, and that while they really didn’t have to worship him, they really should be more grateful for him because without Kakuzu, they wouldn’t have the lives they had now. Most people rolled their eyes, and went back to their phones, or news papers. Kakuzu, who’d followed Hidan from house to house, thought that at the very least it was an accomplishment to get people reading.

It wasn’t until Hidan met a young blind man near the law district that he actually saw the effect of his work. The man’s name was Itachi, and he lived with his younger brother in a single story home. Fake flowers lined the windows in their kitchen, and beyond the door Hidan noticed children’s toys scattered everywhere. It was just the two of them, and despite the man being blind, he carried the toddler on his hip and kept up with the housework flawlessly… or so he thought.

There were so many brownies in the guy’s house Hidan had to be careful not to step on them, and as a preemptive strike, he zipped the messenger bag shut so Scorpion wouldn’t be tempted to chase after the creatures and piss them off. There was a dull meow from his bag, and Hidan pat it wish a stern shh! He watched the way the faithful little workers followed after Itachi and helped him pick up after Sasuke. They closed cupboards he forgot about, and carried off more than their share of fresh fruit. Though they eyed Hidan warily, stepping away from him in their instinct not to be observed, he did his best to keep them comfortable and pay them no mind.

Hidan spent the afternoon drinking badly steeped tea, and telling Itachi all about the god of knowledge. Politely, the man nodded along, but Hidan was sure he was listening more to the toddler who was chattering about the night before. How he’d been absolutely sure that there were dragons out in the sky last night. As Hidan was leaving, his shoulders sagged in fatigue at another loss, Itachi prompted his baby brother: “Wave and say bye bye, Sasuke,” he aided the boy’s hand, but Sasuke smiled and looked over Hidan’s shoulder to Kakuzu, whose head tilted back at him in confusion.

“Bye bye Kazoozoo!” As Sasuke noticed Kakuzu, so did the brownies crawling about the home. Everything went silent as they all stared at the person who hadn’t been there a moment previously.

“Um,” Kakuzu whispered his unease, and Hidan simply picked up Kakuzu’s hand and the same way Itachi had done for Sasuke, and prompted him to wave.

“Keep reading kid,” Hidan chirped, and pulled Kakuzu along to the next house.

---

Hidan didn’t truly consider his plan a success until he’d been such a pain in the ass to the entire community, that Kakuzu had trouble bumping into people when they went to the market. It wasn’t long before Kakuzu had himself a job at the library. There had been a tentative silence between him and the head librarian who had been actively denying the existence of a supposed god of knowledge since Hidan had started his endeavor.

Every time they would come across each other on the street, logical reasoning versus spiritual experiences would clash. Hidan, inevitably would head back to his little home with Kakuzu in tow, having embarrassed himself screeching about how Shikamaru was literally trying to murder Kakuzu.

“It’s like he doesn’t even care! I’m telling you! He looks right at me-- I’m not a human! I mean for shit’s sake, he talks to shadows! I know he does, I’ve seen them! They follow him around like the plague. If anyone needs your help it’s probably him! Those shadows are gonna kill him, mark my words, Kakuzu. Seriously. Are you sure he’s a genius? Because he seems pretty fucking stupid!”

Kakuzu could only smile indulgently. If there was one thing Kakuzu knew about information, was that the spread of it, true or false, could bring things into existence. Whether Shikamaru believed in him or not, enough people were beginning to know his name that soon, they wouldn’t have to listen to Hidan rambling on embarrassingly about some of his greatest accomplishments.

So when Shikamaru approached Kakuzu and told him he started work on monday, his suspicions were confirmed. Shikamaru had been able to see him since the first instance of their encounter. He’d just had too much fun messing with Hidan.

----

So it came to be that Hidan had saved the god of knowledge. Satisfied with the efforts of his savior, there were nights where Kakuzu would feel the glow of warm golden threads inside of him, and he would spin them into dreams while Hidan slept. In the darkness of the cabin, where soot sprites sorted herbs and magical ingredients, and Scorpion filled the silence with his whirring purr as he loafed himself at Kakuzu’s hip, the god would his affection into Hidan’s subconscious. The light bounced off the walls, warm, and pure, and ancient.

Each night he remembered how that hand had cradled inside his chest, and how hands that had only ever brought death, gave life. Kakuzu thought himself not easy to love. His spirit filled entire buildings, his temper shattered glass and broke spellbound spirits into chaos. He was too big to fit through doorways, he crossed fairy rings without second thoughts, and actively chased the brownies down for his coin collection… But in Hidan’s dreams, where he laid back against the grass and stared up at the lights from the calm sanctity of the bottom of the ocean,  he would remember how his mother told him that those who were the most difficult to love often needed it the most. He found that a lot of things that he was taught to be wrong, and he supposed that’s how knowledge really worked. It evolved. It was a living, breathing, loving thing.

Kakuzu was easy to love, and there was definitely nobody who deserved it more in Hidan’s opinion. He was there every morning, reading. Always reading. And he was there every evening before HIdan went to sleep, with pondering eyes that shone like emeralds reflecting the stars.

Hidan was a devoted creature. To his craft, of course, but nobody would ever be able to find anyone more dedicated to the people he considered his. No two creatures had ever been made so perfectly for one another. There would always be a challenge on Kakuzu’s lips to everything Hidan considered true, and there would always be a hard headed stubbornness to argue what Kakuzu had to teach. They were alive within each other, and the nearer they came to one another, the stronger their bodies attracted. From touches, to holding hands, to silences laying side by side, curled into each other.

The first time Kakuzu kissed Hidan, with their lips colliding like light against the earth, it was like Kakuzu had taken his first deep breath of air when he’d been drowning for so long. When his hands found the small of Hidan’s back as he pressed their bodies together in the shadow of their home, Kakuzu realized he didn’t care if anyone else ever knew him. He only ever needed one person to love him.

So long as they had each other, there was no line of definite, there were no impossibilities; Hidan made his home in the greatest thing the universe had ever tried to throw away. What a home it was.

End

[bouncingpenguin]

Silence. There is a noise as if an immense wheel were turning and moving the air. A hurricane separates them. At the same time, two Stars are seen colliding and from them fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if in a vacuum: then three scorpions, one after another, and finally a frog and a beetle which come to rest with desperate slowness – nauseating slowness.

Antonin Artaud, Jet of Blood

[childoftheriver]

Today’s boy

[childoftheriver]

It’s a beautiful day.

[childoftheriver]

Another gift from @yesterdaysanswers to celebrate EmoLakeVember.

[childoftheriver]

Another @auroreamethyste treasure!

[childoftheriver]

From FB - JP Palmentier photographer - 1981

I will remove if requested.

[childoftheriver]

Oh. “What a piece of work is a man!” (WS)

[childoftheriver]

Here’s the beautiful boy, courtesy a FB mutual. And the obligatory close-up.

[childoftheriver]

And this one… (I will remove if requested)

[childoftheriver]

Oh

[childoftheriver]

1977 German tv

[childoftheriver]

Good morning!