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tozettastone · 9 months ago

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Maddie & Hidan fic, NOT the one I was meant to be working on. Takes place about five years after they first meet in Deadbeat.

I do not have any idea if this is "canon" to Maddie's story! I just thought it was fun to write when I couldn't sleep yesterday.

Notes: Hidan POV, contains dismemberment. Maybe I'll stick it on AO3 later?

----

Hidan had no idea how long he'd been stuck here.

He was buried alone in the dark, in pieces.

It was cold underground. The chucks of rock beneath which he was buried were heavy and the dirt that trickled between them was so close he had to spit it out.

His wounds hurt at first, which was a good thing, because Hidan was very practiced at focusing on pain to the exclusion of all else. His devotions demanded it. So at first he was in insistent, nagging agony, and he prayed about it. When his voice wore out he prayed in his head. And then when it recovered again, he prayed aloud some more.

At first he could count time by his prayers, too. But then soon he began to second guess them: had he really counted ten cycles of prayer, or only nine, or five, or three hundred?

It was so cold. The earth sapped the heat from his broken limbs.

How long could it possibly take Kakuzu to finish his fight and come dig him up?

Time dilated into eternity.

And then the places where Hidan's body was dismembered began to go numb. There was no more pain, just a wretched, drowning exhaustion that dragged him under like a riptide.

He slept. He woke up cold. He prayed. He slept again.

He slept a lot.

When he woke, a little more of him was numb each time. The nerves were dead. Without fuel to burn in its holy fire, even Hidan's immortal body was flagging.

When he couldn't feel his body at all and he thought he was actually going mad, something moved overhead.

His eyes rolled up in his decapitated head, as though he could see through the rocks and tiny air pockets and loose sandy dirt to discover what was going on up there.

It might just be a deer. He was rubbish at sensing chakra signatures. For the past six years, that had been Kakuzu's job.

It wasn't a deer, though: the movements remained, muddling around above, and then they became dogged and determined. Eventually light began to leak on through the rocks.

Freedom arrived with the methodical sound of a shovel, stabbing away at the dirt until it hit rock.

Scrabbling hands heaved the rocks out, one by one. Light poured down upon him at last, and he squeezed his eyes shut tightly against the blistering radiance of the sun.

It was like a physical thing on his skin, dazzling down through the forest leaves, even though he'd thought there was no more feeling left.

"Fuck, Kakuzu, it took you long enough," Hidan croaked.

"Sorry," said a voice that was definitely not Kakuzu's. It was breathless and trembling and hard to place. A girl? "I couldn't sense — I didn't realise — lord, I thought there was more t— never mind that." The voice finished mine of these sentences. "Oh my god, you're in so many pieces. Christ, is that what gangrene looks like? Hidan, oh my god, what do I do?"

He squinted. "Maddie?"

"That's me."

"Maddie?"

"Yeah. Last rock, hangon." She pulled off a chunk of stone with some effort. Hidan didn't feel the change in pressure.

It wasn't like she was the last person he could imagine offering him help. But she did live across the other side of the country. And Fire Country was big.

"Where's Kakuzu?"

"I don't know," she said, high and aggrieved. "I have to find him next."

"Okay, okay, shit, don't start crying. We'll find him."

"I'm not crying," she hissed, sounding an awful lot like someone who was crying. "What do I do? Fuck, the deer are, like — I don't know what they're doing but I don't like their chakra."

Oh, the deer. Yeah.

"Just get me out of here."

"Like... in a... bag?"

"Yeah?"

"Fuck. Um. Okay," said Maddie, and then she disappeared for an indeterminate amount of time, during which Hidan may or may not have lost consciousness, and came back with a sack.

She just started loading pieces of him in. Her face was crinkled around the eyes and tense in the jaw. The older she got, the less baby fat cushioned her face and the more she looked like Kakuzu.

"This is foul. Hidan, what if I miss a piece?"

Given the number of pieces he'd been buried in, she was virtually guaranteed to miss something. "It'll grow back. Just pick up the main bits and go."

Maddie took him at his word and commenced cramming dirty, dismembered, diseased body parts into her sack.

Hidan's head went into the sack last. One of his blackened fingers nearly took his eye out on the way. "Ouch. Dammit, be careful. That hurts!"

She adjusted his head. Her fingers were so warm on his scalp they nearly burned.

The sense of her chakra, which he'd barely noticed in his present state, dissolved into practically nothing. The forest was saturated with various signatures already, and she was very good at hiding.

He felt Maddie begin to jog, although he couldn't hear her footsteps. She was incompetent in combat, still, and chickenshit to boot, so if they got caught it would definitely be back into the pit for him — with company, probably — but she was cat-footed and quick and very, very sneaky.

The daylight came through the sack in pinpricks, leaking between the warp and weft of the rough fabric. When they left the forest, the glow of the sun intensified. Maddie's chakra gave the tiniest little flicker and then her gait changed to an all-out dash. Her feet thumped the ground and the sack jostled alongside her, rocking against her moving body with each stride.

He would have liked to have said something, but he was woozy and quiet, just a cold jumble of filthy parts thumping along in her bag.

Maddie was warm through the sack.

Hidan felt better. He would not have said he felt good, exactly; he still felt fucking terrible. But the spiralling madness of his long burial had dissipated, dispelled by that first ray of sunlight.

The murky exhaustion remained, and he soon went under again.

"I think we're in the clear," said Maddie, some time later.

It was cold again, and dark enough outside that no light made itself known in the sack. The coldness seemed to leech all the warmth he'd finally got back straight out of him.

"At least, I sure hope we're in the clear," she mumbled.

"Where are we?" Hidan wondered.

"Um, not far from the coast. I bought a farm. Two farms. On Wave? Gato really ended up devastating the local economy for a while there. It was cheap. I only rented one of them out so far."

"Right," said Hidan. She'd wanted to do that, hadn't she? For some reason?

"I haven't been to this one. I don't know if it's even arable. But hey, land is land, right?" she rambled nervously. "We're nearly at the — haha, at the Great Naruto Bridge." This name seemed particularly funny to her, so she laughed for a second, breathlessly, like a broken hinge. Then she said: "I don't want them to search my bags, and technically the bridge gate is shut anyway, so we're just going to water walk underneath, okay?"

"Sure," said Hidan easily. He didn't have a say, anyway.

"Right," mumbled Maddie.

The ocean stank. Maddie's chakra disappeared again as she tiptoed onto the water.

Hidan fell asleep once more.

The next time he woke, it was because something was stabbing him.

"Ow," he hissed.

The sack was gone. He was on the floor of a bathroom, which was floored in red tiles that crawled halfway up the walls where they turned into whitewashed wood. A chipped, claw-footed tub rose high above his head where it rested on the floor behind him.

Maddie was hunched over him, her long ragged hair trailing onto his jaw. She cringed as she drew a dark thread of her own weird chakra through his neck.

Above them both, a bare electric bulb hummed. Moths gathered around it, flickering shadows against the the yellow light.

"Sorry," Maddie whispered. She finished her line of stitches. From a glance, she'd haphazardly stitched most of his torso together already.

"What're you doing?"

"Rinsing your pieces off in the tub and sewing you back together, I guess. I don't know. What else?"

What else indeed? "Forget the rest for now. I need food."

She let the thread of her chakra fall. "Okay," she said. "What kind?"

Anyone else would have pointed out that he didn't have enough organs to digest anything. But every time Hidan met Maddie, she just got... kind of weirder. She was grim, she was romantic, she was suspicious. She was ambitious. She was pragmatic. She was strangely sentimental.

How had such a strange girl grown up like her? Nobody had raised her this way. She must be like a reed, needing nothing but the black waters of her fetid swamp.

In this case, he was glad for her weirdness.

"Meat." Something that was someone. An individual with conspecifics. He'd eat a human, if he could. "Something that suffered."

She hesitated. "Fish?"

Close enough. "Fine, fish."

What she had was some kind of white fish, the kind fishermen caught all up and down the coast. She washed her hands and fed him flakes of pale flesh from her fingertips, catching them on his chapped lips occasionally. She also brought him water, which she alloted him in cruel sips only, waiting long minutes between.

He was full in about six bites, which he knew to be absurd because he couldn't even feel his stomach, let alone the sensation of fullness.

"I'm going back to sleep," he slurred, then. "Keep sewing."

"Okay," she said again.

"'M cold," he whined, half-conscious. It was night still and he was naked in pieces on the chilly tiles. And it had been cold underground.

"Sorry."

"Ugh," he managed, and then he was out like a light again.

He woke up twice more, numb but steadily more complete. Maddie hand-fed him each time in little flaky white chunks. He was numb and cold each time, and his body might have been sewn back together, but it answered none of his commands. It wasn't even shitting right.

Hidan had only just begun to contemplate a life where this was the new normal, where he didn't heal properly and he just laid there numb and cold and waiting on Maddie to fucking hand feed him like a recalcitrant kitten, when this situation changed.

He woke up at noon on the fifth day, in a truly staggering amount of pain. He cursed loudly. Then he discovered he could move his fingers. Just a twitch.

Thank fuck.

Jashin was not a god of mercies, but he was a god of pain. So Hidan embraced the stabbing agony in each of his limbs and gave thanks.

---

On day seven, Maddie announced herself by dumping his naked, unresisting body into the bath tub. The water was warm, and after so long being so cold — in the darkness of the pit, and then on the tiles for days — it felt searing.

"Fuck!" he yelped, jerking his limbs in uncoordinated distress, because the first wash of heat felt like lava. "Maddie!"

"You complain about the cold in your sleep," she said, but she stuck her hand in the water, frowning, like she was really afraid she could boil him alive by accident. "It's not that hot."

She went back to what she was doing, which seemed to be sweeping up all the detritus of their emergency repairs from the tiles and into a dustpan to prepare for mopping.

Hidan begged to differ, and he opened his mouth to do just that, but then the sensation of warmth finally registered. He shivered from head to toe and made a pornographic moan of relief. "Oh, fuck."

Maddie looked at him as though he was doing this specifically to try her patience. She had completely inherited Kakuzu's unimpressed face. He wondered if she knew.

"Wait, where's Kakuzu?"

She paused in her sweeping for just a moment. "Dead." The rhythmic sound of the brush continued.

"Dead? No shit?"

"So is Sasori, and Deidara, and Kisame, and Itachi by now I guess —"

"Yeah, I don't care about that. What the hell happened to Kakuzu?"

"I'm not ...completely sure. I think they got all his hearts, basically."

...Hidan did have a distant memory of stabbing himself and realising that he had not performed his ritual on the Leaf chuunin he'd been aiming for. Huh.

"I went back and got his body," she added uncertainly. "I guess it would be a bad idea to leave it lying around but..."

"Have you tried just cramming a new heart into it?" Hidan wondered.

"... Do you think that would work?"

"I dunno. No? Maybe?" It felt so good to be warm, even though his whole body was prickling viciously in the heat. His fingers flexed almost like normal. "There's no proof it wouldn't work?"

Maddie put her dustpan and brush down in favour of staring at him, thoughtfully patting her own belly. "I hadn't thought of it. I'll... try? I'll just... cram a heart into his body. Sure. Why not." She paused. "Do you want to come out of the bath first?"

Hidan yawned. "No. I'm going to live here."

"Okay. Try not to drown."

"Ha," he said, deadpan. "You're hilarious."

#naruto oc: murakami madeline #hidan #my fic

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