Chapter 12: Sympathy For The Devil

Hidan

I...I am...Awesome!

After a great long while, but not long enough for him to start chewing his arms off (he had never had a habit of biting his fingernails anyway), Hidan now twisted, observing the flow of his very own black cloak as it swirled around his legs in the mirror. The red cloud designs highlighted the movement and encouraged further posing. Konan stood behind him, observing with a small smile. He paid her no mind as he observed the ass kicking badass in the mirror before him. I should wear clothes more often.

Konan watched as he continued examining himself in the mirror. Her small smile was bittersweet. He really did look much more handsome in the cloak than without it. But still, there was something missing. As he adjusted the collar, trying to make it flare more optimally around his hair, her eyes returned again and again to the empty space between his collarbones. Perhaps it was unconscious habit, perhaps shared preference for as little clothing as possible covering his torso, but either way the cloak was open to just the same amount as she had always observed. There was nothing else to focus on. Everything was the same...except for that space on his chest where a necklace should have been. Konan supposed she should be happy about this. They were different people; it would not be wise to equate them with their originals in her mind. She should be very happy that this Hidan had some accessory (or lack of) to distinguish him by. But the sight saddened her instead.

"Come," she said, turning away. "You have your outfit. There is only so much a mirror can show of it. It's time to put it to the test, see how it holds up with movement, if you would like."

Hidan stopped fussing with the collar and shivered. Best decision ever. Best fucking decision, ever! This is the only possible outfit for messing with spooky things. Without it… Another shiver ran down his spine, this one a genuine prelude to fear. Without it, they might actually be spooky. But now, the only thing I am at all spooked by is how awesome I am! I'm a friggin' ninja. Bring it, ghosts!

He turned without a backward glance and somehow made it to the tailor's desk before Konan did, though she was well ahead of him and he hadn't been running. She had barely even had time to see him cross in front of her. With a swift, fluid and absolutely assured motion he reached for his wallet and set it down on the counter in less than a second. The tailor was startled, but quickly recovered. "Ah, you are back. I take it the product is to your -"

"How much money will you let me give you right now?" was what the tailor was able to decipher out of the jumble of syllables that seemed to tumble from his customer's mouth all at the same time. The man on the other side of the counter seemed a little crazed. His eyes were dilated more than the usual. The tailor shrugged internally. He wasn't an anatomist or anything, he had no reason to care. What he was struck dumb by was the sentence he thought he had heard. That couldn't be right. That wasn't the sort of thing anyone asked. He wondered if this customer was trying to pull something.

He only wondered that for a passing thought before wondering if he had lost his mind. If not for this man, his daughter might not have made it out of her "relationship" with that no-good, scum of the earth, devil-worshipping…that boy. So he put on a smile, which wasn't very hard to do, and joked back, "I do not know how much I can legally accept, sir. Up to your entire wallet, maybe."

The white-haired man in his new outfit proceeded to open the wallet and extract all pieces of identification in under 3 seconds. The tailor opened his mouth to say something, he hadn't yet figured out what, but only got it half open before the man was out the door, his girlfriend having sensibly predicted he would do this and gone outside to wait already. Just as stated, the entire wallet was left behind. The tailor watched them depart faster than seemed humanly possible, hoping that his store cameras would catch the customer willingly doing this with no wrongdoing or unethical business practices involved. Cautiously, he opened the wallet. It was a good thing for his pride, he thought, that he had no other customers or employees to see his knees go weak or watch him slowly stumble to the back and sit down. The tailor had no idea of this, but Kakuzu himself wouldn't have handled the sight any better.

With no prompting, Hidan spontaneously launched forward at his fastest pace. The pavement blurred beneath him. Konan instinctively moved to keep up, leaping to the roof of the buildings he ran next to and keeping up at her fastest pace. It was a pace she did not use without very good reason; this was the fastest she could travel without outpacing her body's own ability to feel tiredness. Damn, it felt good. A couple days with no training or anything had her body primed with overflowing need to move, she realized. The flashing, searing pain and heat came again, almost scorching her skin, and her eyes dilated to the point of pain. A vision of battle filled her eyes. She did not notice her pace speeding up. The concept of tiredness no longer existed.

Hidan saw her begin to outpace him with her rooftop leaping. His eyes narrowed, and chakra was automatically channeled to his feet to fuel his special enhanced speed. Without needing to pay attention, Hidan stopped running and started leaping along the pavement, a strange kind of horizontal leap that propelled him at least twice as fast as Konan was racing now. At this pace he covered an entire street to the next intersection in a single one of such leaps. Corners? No problem! His chakra switched with the switchblade speed of practice from propelling to gripping, allowing him to turn literally on a dime while outracing the most modern high-speed trains. The pavement was curiously unaffected to the usual observer, the mostly horizontal direction of force causing damage of the kind that would not leave visible traces. To lower the risks even further, his chakra also spread into the pavement under each foot and steadied it so the damage was less than it should have been.

Konan took to the skies. Without such a technique, there was no way she could keep up with muscular strength alone, no matter how enhanced. She recalled the wings of falcons she had studied, the better to improve her own flight with, and mimicked them as best she could. Hidan continued to disappear into the distance, but at a much slower rate. After a few seconds of this he realized he had not seen her overtake him again and slowed just the small amount he needed to bring them neck and neck.

As one they turned, putting the surrounding asphalt and trees to a new test. Though he sidestepped with the grace of a dancer around a child's bicycle, it blew over and tumbled into the yard of the neighboring house, smashing through the fence in the way. Windows groaned in their frames and if any of them had had shutters before, they didn't now. One family had obviously picked the wrong time to get the roof re-tiled. Another family discovered the hard way that the right time to get their roof so treated was ASAP. Early-leafing trees discovered their mistake as the small buds of their delayed neighbors did not catch enough of the wind to be torn off the branch. These same small buds and branches, those lucky enough not to be severed, split the edges of Konan's paper wings as she passed, affording greater maneuverability to her. She buzzed Hidan's head on his next leap. His laugh was left behind.

In less time than it would have taken to speed read a transcript of all these events, they both found themselves soaring into the air in a straight vertical climb. Konan reached the peak of her climb faster as her wings had greater air resistance, and darted up at a slower speed. Hidan finished his exclamation "-hoo!" as she swooped in and caught him, then lowered them both to the ground. She set them both down outside the impossibly small circle Hidan had taken off from, in front of the next building past the hotel. They had a job to do.

Hidan hadn't needed to go so far up, really, but the temptation of using his chakra had been too great to resist. Something like that needs one last bang. Now that Konan thought about it, she had no idea if his original had ever learned that running out of chakra entirely was supposed to be fatal. She reminded herself he had been without immortality once, and even if he hadn't they still taught it in any decent ninja school. She wondered if she should tell his clone now.

Hidan looked up. Well, this one wasn't very impressive. It was just an old single story building with offices in it, like a doctor's office or something. It probably wasn't haunted at all. Even so he could not stop smiling as he pulled the door open and stepped into the dark hallway. Konan followed silently.

They checked the first couple of rooms together, then split up at a fork in the hallway. Hidan narrowed his eyes in concentration, trying to monitor himself for any sudden changes in emotional state. When that didn't work he tried something he had not done for a long time. His hands came together to form a seal that was not a seal, each of his hands resembling the "devil horns" hand sign of rebellious listeners of rock music, with the two middle fingers grabbing onto the other hand and the two outer fingers meeting their alternates. His thumbs also met, and the whole gesture was nestled in close to his chest. His fingers had found this to be a comfortable arrangement when he was trying to focus, but he had not needed to focus like this for a very long time.

Focused like this, Hidan walked through the branching collection of old, disused exam rooms. Almost all of the good, useful stuff was no longer present, as it shouldn't have been. There were no files in a filing room he passed. The only piece of useful equipment he could find was a large, weighty scale that probably would have been cheaper to just replace when the doctors moved to a new building. Nothing was knocked over. There was no garbage, everything was in its place, and all the doors in the building were in the same position before he used them. Most importantly, there was no change in Hidan's emotional state, at least not as far as he could tell from his body. His heartbeat slowed perfectly in accordance with stopping intense exercise, his lungs drew breath in the same pattern, there was no tingling of his spine or strange sensations in his intestines. It was boring.

He retraced his steps back to the lobby where the hallways had forked. Konan was already back, the receptionist's area having been much smaller and the staff rooms unimportant. He shook his head and yawned as he returned. She nodded, and they went out the front entrance.

"Hidan?" she asked.

"What?"

"I just thought I should tell you that you should be dead by now."

"Dead? How?"

"You used up all your chakra. Just think - if I hadn't been correct about you having the same abilities as your original, you could have killed yourself with a short race."

"Hey!" Hidan smirked. "If you hadn't been correct, my body would have told me it was running low in shit it needs to live, because that's what bodies do. I'd have been fine."

Konan considered this claim. "Damnit. I suppose you're right. Every ninja is trained to reflexively evade attacks, and your original was much too capable of not doing so when he first joined the group. He did not gain immortality very long before that - there is no way he could have trained himself out of such reflexes in that time."

Hidan elbowed her. "Fuck yeah I was right. Listen to the body, the body knows. If I couldn't handle something I'd have some instinct telling me. I'd know."

"No need to gloat. Try not to get too bored with this next one. 'Just another one in the crowd' is the perfect disguise for a true enemy. Stay alert."

The next building had been used for a different purpose, was of a different design, and was the exact same level of haunted as the last. Hidan left with a whine. This pattern repeated all the way to the far end of the street, Konan nodding to herself after each one. Puzzlingly, she also got more and more tense as they continued. Satisfaction. Wariness. Hidan guessed the two could coexist if you expected that there had to be something wrong somewhere, but why would she expect that? Just because there hadn't been any ghosts so far didn't mean there couldn't be some by the end of the road. Hidan rubbed his hands in hopeful anticipation. It wasn't too late. He wondered if she had something against ghosts, but of course that made no sense.

He looked to his side. Does the street usually look like this? Something seemed different. It seemed like he should know what, but he didn't. He bumped Konan with his elbow. She was no more tense now than she had been at any point after they left the last building, but moved her hands back into a ready position as soon as he made contact. She looked sideways at him.

"Does the road look funny?" he asked.

Konan glanced down, a strangely deep, assessing glance for something so quick. She looked forward, to her other side, even up as she answered in a low voice, "No. Do you sense something?"

Hidan glanced behind him where she wouldn't be able to see, just in case. "It just looks wrong, that's all."

Konan returned to looking at the road surface. "Wrong how?"

Hidan shrugged. "I don't know. It just looks… unhealthy? I never thought of how many cracks it had in it before. Now that I think about it it's the same back home, but I never really noticed."

Konan slowed to a stop and said, in a light conversational tone completely at odds with her words, "I understand just what you mean. That appears to be very wrong indeed."

Hidan looked up. Before his eyes, the road disintegrated. He couldn't easily remember just how cracked the road had been outside the hotel, but he thought it would explain his feeling of wrongness if it was less cracked. The road just beneath them was definitely much more cracked, he would've noticed if it had been this bad. But that was a side note compared to what was happening a foot in front of them. A foot in front of them, the cracks in the road grew blurry from being partially filled in with dust. It didn't look like anything had been crushed; the dust just seemed to flake from the surface of the asphalt itself. In fact, there were actual flakes peeling back in some places where they displaced the dust. After a few feet the road stooped somehow as it almost seemed to sink in the ground. A small plant had tried to take advantage of this. It stood perfectly intact if wilted, every leaf and stem fiber gray. No spots, black or otherwise, interrupted its former flesh.

Beyond that...a line was drawn in the ground. What was outside was ruined, as the lifeless plant showed. What was inside was just wrong. The roadside plants were mostly wilted and shriveled. The grass was interrupted by occasional patches of Astroturf, looking like a bad attempt at restoring some illusion of life to this place. Farther in from the road, a tree was growing. Green it may have been, but at what cost? Its branches were stiff in the wind, their usual asymmetry and the healed scars of the thousand natural shocks that flesh should be heir to nowhere to be seen. It looked like a designed tree, done by a compulsive perfectionist. Neither of them was able to stop the natural movement of their eyes away from the road, but their peripheral vision was enough. That wasn't Astroturf.

Leaves from neighboring woodland had blown in, and some had clustered around the roots of the ornamental shrubs closer to the building where they could not be easily raked away. No spot or blemish disturbed their surface. It wasn't hard to guess that none ever would. The ornamental shrubs themselves were flourishing. They exploded outwards, every branch perfectly green. Every. Single. Branch. The interior was dense and dark and still green, though it would never receive light. The underside? Interchangeable with the top. This was a great violation of the natural order.

The building itself looked 50 years old, at least. Its outside was many muted colors, its stone skeleton showing. Whatever imitated life in the surrounding grounds could do nothing for the nonliving. The best it could do was keep disintegration at bay. Not a single fragment lay in the surrounding explosion of grass, though both Hidan and Konan could practically feel the lack of structural integrity even from this far away. On a visible level, the odd colors of the stone were the only sign of disuse aside from the missing pieces, which had probably fallen before the building was claimed. It was another sense entirely that told the two shinobi that something was very, very wrong here.

Konan held Hidan's hand. It was foolish to deny aid when one truly needed it. She squeezed it sharply, dragging Hidan out of his reverie. He blinked and began to give his report. "I can't feel anything from here," he muttered almost under his breath. "That's weird, right? Whatever it is that's messing with everything, the grass is right there, so whatever it is should be right there too. But I don't feel anything."

"So either the cause of this is projecting its influence this far, or it is nonsentient," Konan supplied. "If it is the first, you might feel something as we approach. I would assume the cause of this is based in the building. Keep your senses open, and stop both of us the second anything changes. If the second, we're effectively dealing with a new kind of natural disaster. It could be chaotic. The procedure is the same in either case, so be alert."

Hidan apologetically worked his hand out of her grip and pressed them together again. "Sorry, helps me focus. Y'know, it might be a better idea for you to go first. How far can you send those butterflies?"

Konan nodded. "Far enough." Once more, sheets of paper began to fly out of her cloak and fold themselves in the air. They flew to the building with surprising speed and vanished around the corners, seeking an entrance. Konan explained, "They are directed by my will and will flutter around filling a given area until locating the target, at which point one will fly back and inform me. I have no idea if they are useful without a specific target, so let's just wait a few minutes. We'll approach then, at the latest."

Hidan wondered how that worked. So is some part of her in them or something? Or, since she's clearly still using jutsu which means she's using chakra, do they connect back to her with chakra? On a mission was probably a bad time to ask, so he returned to concentrating. The trouble with that was, he couldn't anchor his concentration to anything. How am I supposed to look for something when I don't have anything to look at? He settled for sweeping all the bodily functions that usually changed when emotions did, and in between sweeps trying to think of anything important he'd seen before like she had asked. A minute in, he realized that the effort itself was changing his feelings, causing him no small frustration. He groaned and gave up, lowering his hands and looking to Konan to see if anything was going on.

"Anything?" she whispered.

"I can't see anything when I look for it," he replied. "The focusing is frustrating as shit. And that was after I settled for just trying to sift through my memories, which is a fuckton easier than looking at everything for nothing. I just wanna go in already!"

Konan sighed, then stopped two-thirds of the way through. She forced herself to take a slow, silent breath as she focused on the building. There, it came again. Then...what even was that?

"Hidan," she barked. "Something is happening to my butterflies. I can feel my chakra being severed as they are destroyed, and none are coming back to report. At least one of them is… I'm not sure. It's been taken from me. We're going in."

Konan

She doubted any area of the surrounding grounds was free of influence. The patches in the grass thickened and grew together only a few meters in, and the path leading to the front entrance was no better. It looked fuzzy in a way gravel and stone should not even from here, and changed colors at random like something diseased. Even so, they had to go in. She looked up. The air did not seem changed; light passed through it normally. It would have to do. She used yet more paper to give herself wings, and picked up Hidan as she took to the air. It required spending some chakra to boost her strength, but he was on the light side. Thank gods for that.

Hidan tried his best to focus as they swooped in. His first report began as they passed over the ornamental shrubs. "I feel good all of a sudden," he quickly informed her. "Like it's all right, and I'm cared for and watched over and shit. I'm not afraid."

Konan's eyes were drawn beneath him to where little green shreds floated down to join the shed leaves at the base of the shrub. What, no, who is cutting them? She'd been too focused on the plants being changed in some unnatural way to notice the signs of a more human touch. No form of growth could have given the leaves cut edges. They swooped closer.

There was a bench hidden behind some bushes near the building. It made a nice, private resting area where one could be free from noise. It would have been more appealing if Hidan hadn't commented, "It's sad now…"

Konan flew once around the entire building, hesitant to commit to a single point of entry. As she flew next to the left side of the building, which was a solid mass of windows, Hidan waved. Who is he waving to? Konan stopped in midflight and hovered in the air as she prepared to turn a corner, almost losing her grip on Hidan. A white paper butterfly fluttered in one of the last windows before the corner. As she watched, it repeatedly bounced against the glass, crumpling its leading edges as it tried to get out. Konan wondered if it was trying to report, but with Hidan in her hands she could do nothing. "Hidan, get a kunai and -" the butterfly's wings spasmed like the heart beat of a cardiac arrest victim, failing to keep it up in the air. It went completely still and drifted to the floor, out of sight.

Konan continued her survey of the entire building, slowing to the point where Hidan asked her why she was going so slow. Her response was short and quiet, simple statements. The loss of her scouting jutsu was continuing. The one butterfly in the window demonstrated that at least some of the loss was unnatural, like nothing she had ever before experienced. That meant the situation was unknown and extremely dangerous, which meant they had to take extra care to gather information before entering harm's way. If they went in with no information it would be tantamount to committing suicide. Hidan went quiet at this argument. He could find nothing wrong with it. Everything she said made perfect sense. Yet… Well, she wasn't the type to go off hunches anyway, so he kept his mouth shut.

No more anomalous incidents happened, no more frightening sights were presented to them. Konan ground her teeth together just a little. Where had that thought come from? Presented? I have no reason to believe there is anyone in the building trying to frighten me. The room was empty, Hidan has detected no malicious intent. Unless… There were the plants to consider. Unless I'm willing to believe that we are about to walk into a ruined environment to confront a god. Am I willing to believe that?

Hidan looked up, concerned. "You okay? You picking up anything? This feels super shitty. Are we going to die? I can't think." No, Konan thought, but you can feel. Hidan was right. At least part of the reason for slowing down was that her ability to process information was failing. Her hands had been painfully tight under Hidan's arms ever since she had seen the butterfly, but that sight had only accelerated the process. Konan had no idea why, but her bodily processes were rapidly becoming more and more disordered. Her chakra threatened to break, her heartbeat pounded chaotically, and it was becoming harder and harder even to control her thoughts. She was briefly jealous that Hidan's ability was picking up only benign feelings, that it was protecting him. She had no such shield.

Her wings beat fiercely, and Konan was startled to see a wall backing away from them. When had she…? She shook her head, made a deliberate effort to refocus her eyes. This effort was interrupted by a sudden jolt, and she pulled all her chakra together to keep them out of free fall. This close and in physical contact, no amount of shielding could protect Hidan. His entire body started to shake, and she almost dropped him. At the last second she dodged left to avoid impaling him on a branch of a wrong tree. Hidan froze and started to whine at such a high pitch that she would have covered her ears in any other situation. Konan looked around, the environment swimming. Nothing was describable, nothing looked right. She made out a quick line of grey and urged everything, every muscle in her body to head for it. Get away from here. I need to get away from here. Out. Out. Away. There's the road. Go there. We're going to die and fall and die and crumble and turn grey and zzzzzzzzzzzzzjjjjjjjjjjhhhhhhhhsssssssss -

The fear lifted. Her eyes flew open and for just a moment took in the world before her. It was a sea of wrong grass. Hidan lay some distance away, wiggling around on the ground to make sense of his surroundings, trying to sit up. Konan realized they were still in enemy territory. Panic while flying is bad. I can't feel my chakra. There's a nonzero possibility we will in fact die on this mission. That last thought seemed odd, as if there should be something important about it. Konan wondered what it could be. The thoughts felt as if someone was whispering them directly to her brain. She watched Hidan struggle to his feet. Her heart beat rapidly, the temperature around her too warm. Someone should turn down the air conditioning in here. I should go find someone… But when she tried to turn she couldn't. It was impossible to move. Oh. Right. I'm alone. Bodies only get one occupant at a time. Wasn't that unusual? Who made that rule?

She reached, tried to move her arm, to reach out for Hidan. He was now looking around. Movies today have such stupid characters. What does he honestly think he's going to see? The villain is invisible, obviously. The empty room behind the butterfly proved that. Boo. Hiss. Her arm did move, just a little. She'd never thought about how nice it looked before. She looked down, looked at the interplay of colors over her cloak and skin and nails. It was a very artistic looking arm. The nails could stand to be a little darker, for more contrast. The ends of them were starting to chip. Someone should be taking better care of this.

Suddenly her viewpoint changed, tilted. Hidan lifted her up, balancing Konan against the side of his knee. He shook her opposite shoulder as much as he could without making her fall over. "Konan? We have a mission. Wake up!"

Right, the mission. Konan blinked, feeling her eyelids echo the movement. I should investigate the amazingness of the human body further sometime. But he's right, of course. There's a mystery to solve. She put an arm beneath herself and got to her feet. They stood together, Hidan shaking his head to ward off the effects of the sudden adrenaline withdrawal. He had a headache starting and felt rather tired. Whiplash sucked. He wanted to go home and sleep. But fuckit, he hadn't come all this way for ghosts only to turn back now. He reached over to Konan and pulled her by the sleeve after him, into the building. A little residual feeling of happiness that trickled in through his sense helped, and he was well aware it would not survive actual physical contact with Konan. She did not seem to have anything useful to him.

They walked into the front lobby of the building and stopped, looking around. Konan reflexively classified everything she saw. Intake desk. Portrait. Checkin/checkout forms. Staff rooms. Hallway to patient rooms. Other hallway to different patient rooms. Someone's looking through the checkout forms. That's unauthorized. I should report this to the supervisor, someone needs to get that person assigned to a body ASAP. Floor. Hole in floor. Chairs. Something seemed like it should be important again. She traced back over her thoughts, finding nothing unusual. Maybe it was the supervisor. I actually don't have any idea how to get in contact, now that I think about it. Damn. Someone needs to be doing something about this renegade.

She sighed. That wasn't exactly in the job description of any bodied person, so she let it go. They would be assigned or not on their own time. She felt distinctly uncomfortable now. Something was weird and strange. What was it? She looked at Hidan, tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention. He seemed to be looking at the renegade shuffling the papers with an unreadable expression. At her touch he turned. "Hidan, something's wrong," she stated. "People aren't supposed to be outside their bodies. That's the rule. Someone needs to do something. If this is the sort of place that tolerates such behavior, we should not be here."

Hidan looked at her in confusion. "I don't see anything wrong with alternative body styles," he huffed. "Why are you being so judgmental? He's not hurting anyone. I feel nothing but a little bit of sadness. If he wants to be sad, that's his own problem."

Konan shook her head. "But in public?"

Hidan bristled. "What's wrong with being yourself in public?"

Konan shook her head. Her thoughts were speeding up. The feeling of importance was coming back. Everything around her looked different. A new label came to her. Hospital. The wrong plants. The person shuffling the papers. All of these things seemed to be much more important suddenly. She remembered the plants having been important before the crash. Her hands began to shake, but she reflexively stilled them. The butterflies were all gone by now. A lucky third of them had been destroyed. The rest were no longer hers, though she could still feel them. They moved back and forth on the upper floor. "No one wants to see your most private parts, that's why," she snapped. "We have a mission to accomplish. Let's go." And she dragged him over to a hidden stairwell, leaving behind the renegade searcher.

Konan froze for a moment, as if she was being watched, before looking up the stairs. Several steps were missing, and several others looked ready to fall apart at any moment. It was possible that whatever held this building together would not allow the remaining stairs to collapse. But did she trust that force? No, no she did not. Luckily the wall, though covered with flaking plaster, looked much more stable. Konan started forward and found the problem with this plan.

"Hidan?"

"Whazzit? You have some way to get past the missing steps?"

"I would, if I could feel my chakra."

Hidan scratched his head and tried to copy what the others had done earlier when demonstrating their jutsus. "I think I can feel mine. Can I give you a ride?"

Konan swallowed, almost prepared to bow to him if he asked. "Thank you. I will need a ride." She wiped her palms on her cloak and resisted the urge to look around frantically. It would not help.

Hidan found another reason to wear clothes more often as the fabric of his cloak offered a much better grip than his bare skin would have. With her on his back, it felt just like an embrace. Especially when he started walking and her arms tightened even more over his shoulders. He wondered how to get her to hug him more often in the future, and followed her directions over to the wall. He had to put his hands on the wall to avoid losing balance as he climbed onto it, then stood up. The stairwell was thin enough that they were forced to duck. Konan's arms made an effort to relax as much as they could.

She dismounted at the top, since the floor of the upper hallway was miraculously free of holes. Walking forward, she peered to her left. She no longer felt anything to guide her. Had even the stolen butterflies been destroyed? "Hidan, do you see any -"

He was gone.

The hallway was completely empty, just her and the stairwell. Konan had to stifle a cry of some high-pitched sort. She had felt nothing, not the slightest trace of wind from his movement. No sound. Her eyes jerked around, looking everywhere. Where, and just as importantly how, had he gone?

Since he was to her right and she hadn't seen him, she darted down the right hallway. She paused after looking for him in the first room, and looked again. A book sat open on a desk, and in the corner were toys. New toys. The room actually looked very nice, the sheets made and everything. A few patches of plaster indicated recent minor repairs. The pillow had a depression in it, the shape of a person's head. As she watched, it changed shape, the side of the pillow in her direction becoming flatter. Konan averted her eyes and continued down the hall, walking slowly because her knees would not allow her to go any faster. Just a person. One who doesn't happen to have a body, that's all. How dare he, it's against the rules. That was what I thought before, and everything was fine. I was not in any danger. Oh gods I need to find Hidan. Why are my knees so wobbly?

The second room held a bookcase that could not have been older than a decade, if that. The third down the hall showed signs of someone looking for something in it, but no Hidan. The next room held a potted plant. It was literally all right angles, not having wasted any time pretending to be natural. Right beneath the potted plant was a couple footprints in a patch of dust, the first dust she'd seen in the entire building. They had the same general size and shape as Hidan's shoes. Konan considered the possibility that Hidan was playing some weird form of hide and seek with her, then slapped herself on the face with a particularly violent facepalm. I'm letting fear make me stupid. Someone is messing with me, but it's probably not Hidan. It's time for the enemy to reveal themself. Release!

Nothing changed. Her chakra settled back to its normal flow, and nothing in the environment had changed. She had not even felt as if her efforts had done anything, as if there was anything to be thrown off. If this was Genjutsu, it was at least on Itachi's level. Konan wondered just why she had walked into this in the first place.

An echo of a sound came from the hallway, a faint whisper of air movement. She turned and stepped out cautiously. There was nothing. No one was in the hallway, and there was no sign that anyone had ever been in the hallway. She looked behind her. The dust on the floor was gone, and the plant was all curves and drooping leaves. Konan froze, then finished her turn to go back in and search the room more thoroughly.

A hand pressed into her back! With the speed of a maniac on cocaine she whirled around and pulled out a kunai all at the same time. An empty hallway of shadows was all that greeted her eyes. The sunlight that bounced down the hall was turning gold. Behind one of the golden beams, a shadow moved. It disappeared before her arm was even fully extended, the kunai bouncing off the wall and clattering on the floor when it should not have done either. Nothing whatsoever happened for the next minute as she looked around, covering the hallway and room with her gaze. Nothing changed. The kunai lay where it had fallen, the plant drooped as much as it had before. The beams of light did not move. Only after a full minute did Konan take the risk of moving, walking slowly over to her kunai and bending to retrieve it.

She was nearly knocked to her feet as a tremendous weight landed on her back, wrapping its arms and legs around her. She did scream this time, but at such a high pitch it was inaudible to human ears. She stood up with no weight on her back at all, turning in circles frantically. Again the hallway was empty. A hand patted her head, brushing against the paper flower in her hair. She reversed her spin and looked up to a blank ceiling. Slow footsteps sounded down the hallway in the direction she had come from, the quiet footsteps of someone who habitually practices stealth but does not happen to be doing so at this exact moment. It came from around a corner. She put a kunai in each hand and advanced, dreading what she would find.

The sounds seemed to change as she approach, becoming a little familiar to her ears. Her chest froze at this new horror. They stopped, then changed direction, moving in a small circle. A board squeaked, a sound that felt like it pierced her heart. Konan narrowed her eyes and held up a kunai, edging to the corner silently. She peered around the corner at an angle, and dropped both kunai as waiting eyes met hers.

"Hey, where the fuck were you? Wait...wasn't that the hallway I was standing near?" Hidan frowned and scratched his head. "I couldn't even feel you. Even when I focused. Pretty sure that's never happened."

Konan received the words but did not absorb them. She walked over to Hidan and grabbed his hand, urged him, "We have to get out of here right now."

Hidan stared at her. He could feel her now, all the deep unsettlement she was experiencing, but did not have enough time to understand. "Wha? But don't we have a…"

Konan brought the exact memories to the forefront of her mind, omitting only the scream. The hand on her back. The sudden weight. Hidan let out a scream that he quickly blocked by shoving his forearm in his mouth anyway. He stared at her, eyes wide. She nodded at him, pulling him back to the stairs. He did not resist at first, but stumbled as they neared the stairs. Konan looked back. He had lowered his forearm, now looking confused. He tilted his head as if sensing something she could not.

"What is it?" she whispered urgently.

"Happiness," he replied.

It took her a while to understand the meaning of that collection of sounds he had just made. She stared, completely failing to connect that word to their current situation in a way she could make a question out of. Hidan blinked at her, equally off balance. He at least was able to recognize the need to let go of her hand, and recovered his wits.

"There's a lot of happiness here," he whispered. "Hope. When I touch the walls I get different feelings. It hasn't always felt like this, this is all new hope and happiness and shit. Something's better, a lot better. Whatever's here is good and shit."

Konan stared at him, still unable to make connections between that and the touch she could still feel on her back. Hidan's face twisted into deep confusion and thought. "So it's good, and also super wrong, and powerful, and scaring the crap out of you, but not me, and I have no fucking idea what the fuck is going on here…" His eyes widened so far she could see a neat little ring of blood vessels around the edges. "Oh. My. Fucking. DICK! You...JERK!"

"Hee hee. You rang?"

Between the opposing influences of the muddled mess she felt, Konan turned around at a perfectly normal speed. There, sitting on the railing around the top of the staircase, was a little boy. He appeared to be only 8 or so years old, and was smiling. Each eye lifted up in a perfectly innocent happy curve that indicated so. Her eyes traced him from top to bottom. His hair was medium length and white, hanging in bunches around his face. A clump of it hung down right between his eyes, over his nose. It was not quite long enough to touch the mask that stretched across his face, dark blue cloth covering his nose and mouth. The mask continued down his neck where it disappeared beneath his similarly dark blue, thick long-sleeved shirt. Said shirt was protected by white plates of armor covering the shoulders and running down the arms on the outside. Leather straps crisscrossed his torso in an X shape, supporting something small on his back. His pants were more of the same color. His shoes, the standard open-toe shinobi style.

Konan felt her higher logic mechanisms pack up and take a vacation. She let them, they had earned it. Hidan's anger stayed but faded to his emotional background as she laughed like he had never heard before. Scratch that; it was more than clear from her personality that nobody, ever, had heard her laugh like that before. It was free. It was careless. He was very worried she was going insane.

The boy stared at her, fascinated. When she eventually stopped, he clapped. She caught her breath and stared at him. "You...you...this world...ah, I have no idea what the hell is possible. Anything could be. I don't have any reason to believe anything's impossible anymore." She looked at Hidan, and he felt even more terrified by the look in her eyes. "What's next?"

Hidan struggled to give an answer that wouldn't send her further over the edge. To be honest, although he had felt her earlier fear he had no idea why the sight of the boy would have been enough to cause her to snap. He had not felt close enough to the limit of what she could handle for that. Was something else going on? "Not much. I don't know what you think this kid is, but he's just a little asshole. Trust me on that one. Yeah, an asshole with some power to mess with reality, but still just a little dick."

He turned accusingly to the boy. "What the fuck, you little jerk? Last time I was aware of your existence you were messing with people in town and playing with zombies. You asked me if I would 'loan' you my forearm!" He smirked, amusement entering his voice. "Did you seriously get so bored that you had to resort to taking care of people just to keep yourself entertained? How bored does that have to be? Heh, you deserve it."

"Hey!" the boy objected. "Keeping a people-zoo is cool!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. Fuck, you must have been desperate!"

"It's sustainable!"

Hidan still smirked at him. "Yeah, it is. It's way too much responsibility for you to be demonstrating. Did something change?"

The boy popped down behind him from the ceiling. "I still got zombies. Wanna plaaaaaaayyyy?" His eyes were curved happily again.

Konan marveled. She had not seen him move at all, yet he had gone from the railing to the ceiling. "What are you?"

The boy was then sitting on her shoulders, his weight too light for his mass. "You can call me Overflow, if you want to call me anything. I'm the local demon. Welcome!"

She looked up at him. "I like my arm. I see no reason to give it up."

He hopped down, standing beside her. "What would I want with your arm? You need that to be able to do all the super cool awesome things! How would you be interesting without it?"

Konan tilted her head. "Would you borrow my arm if I was boring?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you would be freaking out and the look on your face would be funny and I've already chewed through all the forearms in my collection."

Hidan growled down at him. "No, you wouldn't, because I won't let you. Stay the fuck away from my friends!"

The boy looked up. "I hope you have enjoyed your stay at the Abandoned Hospital People Zoo! Please come again soon!" He smiled again and evaporated. His body seemed to become shadow as he did so, Konan thought. Hidan stamped his foot in anger.

"He's such a little jerk, that jerk," Hidan grumbled. "But I'm glad to see he's turning over a new leaf, I guess. Let's go home."

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