Chapter Text
The day somebody new occupies the cell next to his, is when Kakuzu reads about the fall of the first city. Infection rates that went beyond control, preparations for mass graves, politicians discussing the use of weapons of mass destruction. There are photos in the newspaper of burnt houses, body bags lined up in the court of a hospital, and an overhead shot of the horde gathering together by the city centre.
The warden watches him read through the small window in the door, arms crossed impatiently. “Time to give it back,” he tells him.
Kakuzu skims the rest of the headlines. Economy crashes, refugees on the borders to leave the falling countries, the weather, sports. Through the hatch below the window he returns the newspaper and is left alone without exchanging another word.
Something is said to the newcomer in the next cell but Kakuzu decides to not pay any attention to that. A few more months and he’d finally done his time. He’d be out of here again. No use in making new acquaintances, friendly or antagonistical. They might even let him out of solitary earlier if he kept up his routines and showed nothing but good behaviour.
Wake up, work out, have the newspaper with one of his meals, work out more, try not to go insane, ignore the other inmates that he shares this cell block with, go to sleep. Repeat.
Repeat.
“We can be glad it’s so far away,” the warden remarks with a shrug when he reads the headlines himself. Another city is surrounded by hordes from the first one. Its citizens are being tested for the infection before they are allowed to board planes and be flown into safe zones. Photos of tanks, medical tents, and passenger planes.
Repeat.
Photos of burning buildings and a mound of charred corpses. Kakuzu raises a brow at that one. “The government has lost control,” he says to the warden expecting nothing more than another shrug.
But the man simply takes the newspaper back with sweaty hands. “Think twice before you decide you want to get out of here,” he tells Kakuzu, “This might become the most secure place to be.”
Repeat.
The second city is overrun. The warden makes the same half-joke again.
Repeat.
On the fifth day, during his workout routine, there's a dull knock against the wall and the man in the next cell raises his voice for the first time. Before Kakuzu has only heard him hissing and spitting at the wardens, and some other times they’ve gone into his cell to start a scuffle only for it to be quiet for hours after.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
Hidan doesn’t get an answer immediately. The bright lights at least serve to assure him that it’s still daytime. He’s been here for only a few days but the silence gets to him. He is used to the outsides, sky above him. The walls are limiting and the room feels smaller than it is, so tight that it makes him feel that he can’t even stretch his arms. It’s not true, it’s his mind telling him that. After all, he gets up for his prayers every day. When the lights are switched on and the humming electricity has to forcefully become background noise again. When he has gotten his breakfast of mashed whatever-it-is and returned the dishes.
Nobody in the block is talking more than necessary. Two people at the end of the hallway hold conversations but only unintelligible whispering reaches Hidan’s cell.
He’s heard the stories about solitary confinement. How it slowly but surely is bound to make you go insane. Only a few days in he can say that it goes faster and slower than he had expected. More than once he’d acted up, decided to pull in his warden by the arms through the hatch when meal time came, to smash their heads against the door. Something, anything to spill some blood and make the day more interesting. More colourful, too. Some red would do the boring grey concrete walls and high security doors some good.
But it’s the acting up that gets him sedated, so that he sleeps for most of the day and doesn’t have time to go insane.
For two days in a row he doesn’t do that. No pulling at arms, no spitting against the window hoping that through some magic it would go through and hit the warden in the face as intended. No banging and kicking against the door. Because none of that will get him out of here. Logically, he knows that. No point in fighting when the point is that there’s nobody to fight.
He grows bored quickly, and punches a fist against the wall separating him from the neighbouring cell. He knows someone is in there, getting the newspaper every day.
“You deaf? What’s your name?”
Still no answer. Hidan gets up and presses his nose flat against the small window in the door. His field of view is small. He sees part of the hallway, the cell doors opposite from him and some of the hollow faces of the men inside there. But no matter how much he strains his neck there is no chance for him to glance even at the door of his neighbour’s cell.
He calls out for the two others at the end of the hallway but instead of answering they end whatever conversation they were having.
“Fuckers,” Hidan curses under his breath and sinks down with his back against the door. After a while he starts praying. When he first stepped through the doors of the building complex he’d been searched for any belongings that weren’t approved by the wardens. They took his pendant away, hard silver, he could possibly harm himself with that. The only thing he has left are the words that he starts murmuring to himself.
Without anyone else to talk to he can at least hope that Jashin will still listen and answer.
Another week goes by in which Kakuzu wakes up, has his meals, works out, ignores the others, goes to sleep. Repeat.
The newspaper shows the first close-up photographs of the walking infected. They’ve been described in many articles before as living corpses. Kakuzu can see that. Sunken in faces, hollow cheeks, no light in the eyes, and they are covered with ulcers from wounds where their skin has tightened around their bones so much that it ripped open. Together, thousands of them, ten thousands, make a horde and advance further into the country. They overrun the smaller towns and villages on their way, eating those they don’t turn and turning those they don’t eat.
More photos of mounds of body bags.
“It’s getting worse,” the warden says nervously, “If they cross the border to us, it’ll be hell.”
“I’m sure we’ll be safe in here,” Kakuzu tells him, his voice dry with disuse.
The warden takes the newspaper back and leaves.
Just as the security door shuts behind him, the man in the next cell speaks up again. “Man, what’d you do to land here?”
“Don’t bother me,” Kakuzu says and returns to his routine.
He knows he made a mistake in acknowledging the other’s existence when the man doesn’t shut up anymore. Now that he knows he is listening he calls out for him more regularly. After every meal and when the warden has left with the newspaper again. Judging from the voice, it's a young man and Kakuzu imagines him all pressed up against the window while he’s talking. All the while he tries his best to ignore him.
Still he doesn’t come around overhearing when the man starts one of his rebellions again, trying to fight one of the wardens.
Two weeks in is the first time he almost gets to see the man’s face. It’s when the howling of the other inmates grows louder and one of them calls out for the wardens. “There’s blood,” they say and all of them press up against their doors like caged animals because this is the first interesting thing to happen in this madness-inducing nightmare of a cell block. It’s far from the first time Kakuzu has witnessed someone have a breakdown. He’s been close to it before, too. So when he finally gets up to watch the scene as well, watch as the wardens guide his cell neighbour out and to the hospital block, the doors are already closed again and only some wardens on cleaning duty stay behind to wipe up the blood.
Back to the routine, then.
The next morning the man is already back when Kakuzu wakes up. “They, uh, put my arm in bandages,” he tells him through the doors even though nobody asked him and from then on he keeps talking about everything and nothing. As though he thinks that talking will distract him from the inevitable descent into madness. “I can’t stand it here,” he says, “I hate it. Y’know, I still haven’t seen the sun once. And they still have my pendant, refused to give it back.”
Every morning it’s the same. Grey ceiling, grey walls, grey mash of this supposed food, water bottles with the labels removed. There is no sun and no moon anymore. It’s day when the lights are on and night when they are off. Humming electricity. Occasionally some sobbing from the other cells.
The wardens wordlessly bring the meals and clean clothes. Even when Hidan is led to the showers for a quick cold rinse nobody talks to him and only ten minutes later he is back in his grey box, damned to wait out in solitude.
Waiting for what, he doesn’t know.
There is still no response when he tries talking to his neighbour but he knows he is there and unless he’s been granted the luxury of earplugs he is forced to listen. More than once it gets a warden to swat at his door with a baton to silence him again. Hidan finds that he doesn’t care and keeps doing it anyway. If they end up sedating him, he’ll gratefully take it if it means he would just sleep through everything.
He keeps saying his prayers every day and nothing changes. No matter how long he kneels and mumbles the words for himself, everything stays the same. There are days he feels like crying because nobody answers him. No divine voice from above, no whispering in his head that isn’t him, no voice from the other cell.
He grows desperate again. The wardens keep an eye on him, he knows that much, to ensure he won’t rip the bandages off his arm and hurt himself again. He ponders the idea of that again and it fails at the execution because they don’t give him metal cutlery anymore. His food is served with plastic and styrofoam dishes. “Should have done with from the beginning,” his warden had remarked, “A nutcase like this one.”
Three weeks in and the man in the next cell interrupts Kakuzu’s reading time for the first time. It’s a bold move with the warden right there waiting for the newspaper to be returned. “What’s going on in the world?”
Kakuzu looks up at the warden who looks at the other man’s door, and both of them stay quiet. When he is done reading, he hands the newspaper back, and the warden leaves with the same wordless manner as always.
Kakuzu waits for a while and the man in the next cell keeps asking for him, what his name is and what is happening in the world, and other things that aren’t his business. Really, none of this should be of any importance to that man. Nevertheless Kakuzu finds himself scribbling onto a shred of paper he ripped from the newspaper. When they had first put him in solitary he had asked to write a letter — to someone who no longer existed but nobody needed to know that —and kept the pen. If anyone knew that he still held onto it, they didn’t care enough to take it away from him.
He hates doing it but he rips a thread from his jumpsuit and binds the scrap of paper to it, pushes it through under the door. With the thread he swings the paper over the floor and towards the other’s cell door. He’s seen other inmates communicate like that, by sending their messages over a small network of threads between their cells. It takes multiple tries but eventually he succeeds.
Hidan hadn’t expected an answer, especially not in the form of written words. The handwriting is rough and the man in the other cell clearly hasn’t properly held a pen in ages. But it’s legible enough that he can read it without further problems.
Five cities overrun. Horde’s moving west.
On the backside of the note is half of a photo showing a walking corpse. Empty yellow eyes staring right at the photographer, mouth hanging open to reveal teeth covered in brown and red slime. In the corner the article is cut off. “ —infection through scratches or bites ,” it reads.
“Shit,” he whispers to himself.
And then he smiles.
Because he’s gotten an answer out of the man.
One of these days the wardens bring in two new people and stuff them into the cells opposite to theirs. Kakuzu overhears them talking about misdemeanor and violent behaviour, and then he goes on with his day.
The hordes are still moving west, they’re close to the border now. The food gets worse.
It’s the man in the next cell whose voice catches his attention again over his working out. This time it’s no attempt to talk to him. “There’s fucking blood,” he says.
Sure enough, the windows of the newcomers’ cells are stained and smeared red. There’s snarling and gurgling coming from it. A hand smacks against the glass, pale and covered in rashes, the sleeve torn to bits up to the elbow. Then the face comes into view. Empty yellow eyes and wide open mouths.
The pleas start about an hour later when the few inmates from the other cells are all watching what is unfolding in the newcomers’ cells. The men’s skin seems to shrivel down and the rashes become torn open wounds, only helped along by how they scratch their arms bloody. Finally there is blood, and when there is blood is when the wardens come.
They open one cell first and command the man to stand back and put his hands up. From where his cell is Kakuzu can’t see everything but he seems to comply as the wardens go in to put cuffs on. There’s a brief scuffle and when they haul the man out with his knees dragging over the floor and clearly struggling to stand up. “Help me,” he sobs, “Help me, please!”
The wardens lead him out of the cell block while their colleagues stay behind to take care of the other man who is now loudly banging against his door, punching his knuckles bloody against the window frame. He’s snarling loudly, hissing and spitting while he does. They tell him multiple times to stand back and wait until they come in. But he doesn’t move.
Empty yellow eyes have zeroed in on the men in front of him, following their every move.
It’s eerie to look at even through the small frame of the windows. The snarling noises, the hissing, the rashes.
One warden takes the other to the side and for some minutes they discuss something with hushed whispers. They must know, Kakuzu thinks, they must know even more about it than him. He can imagine that there’s been new security measurements in place, new ways they are supposed to handle this. From what he’s learnt from the newspapers, there aren’t many procedures to follow when one is confronted with an infected.
The next minute nothing happens, air tense with the hesitation and swallowing down spit. Silence in the hallway because everyone is waiting for what will happen next. Even though Kakuzu knows.
The wardens draw their guns and one of them goes to open the cell door, keeping himself hidden behind it.
The prisoner shoots forward the second the door moves, eyes on the warden in front of him keeping the gun trained on him.
Kakuzu presses his hands onto his ears.
A shot.
He still startles.
Out of reflex everybody jumps back from their windows. Curses hissed through the hallway. The voice of the other warden calling out “Shoot him in the head! The head!”
Another shot.
Almost more ear piercing than the first.
Then a body heavily hits the floor and still lies there, bleeding out, when Kakuzu approaches the window again.
Some staff are called, with stretchers to carry the body away, and another cleaning team takes care of the mess they leave behind. The cell block falls quiet again, the two men at the end of the hallway are the only ones still holding a conversation.
“Fucked up,” the man in the next cell only comments.
Kakuzu gets his newspaper later that day and during the last days he has made a habit out of taking a paper scrap from it to write the news on it and slip it into the neighbour's cell. The man there stays quiet that way and it keeps him out of trouble for the most part. It means that he won’t knock against Kakuzu’s wall in the middle of the night and ask him for his name over and over again.
Hidan wakes up to the hasty opening and closing of multiple doors and people running back and forth. There’s not much he gathers from the radio calls and overhead speakers with all the commotion going on. But with everything that went down over the last weeks it’s not hard to guess that the infection has long since crossed the borders and made it here. The prisoners from a few days ago – maybe it had also been an entire week already – were only the beginning.
He watches as the inmates from the cells are brought outside one by one. They disappear behind the security doors never to be seen again. One of the blabbermouths from down the hallway is escorted past him, struggling against the wardens to no avail, and he too disappears.
Hidan sinks down against his door, clasps his hands together and imagines that he still has his pendant. And he prays. For what, he doesn’t know. Something along the lines of Please let this be over. But what is this? What would it mean for it to be over?
Nobody returns to get him too.
There is more commotion behind the security door that separates the entire cell block from the rest of the prison.
Rattling gunfire.
Screaming.
He’s almost convinced that none of this is real at all, that the solitude has finally made him go mad, and everything around him is simply a product of his mind. But the paper scraps in his pocket remind him of reality. So for a long time he stays where he is and prays.
Jashin has always been there for him, from the very beginning. Ever since he first learnt about Him and even before that. Throughout all his life he had been lucky enough to escape death himself by paying with other’s lives. He had been allowed to end up here, in a solitary cell far away from home, but alive. He was alive.
So maybe he is praying for a way out. For a miracle to appear and get him out of the cell. If he stayed here longer, he would go mad. He simply knew.
Jashin doesn’t answer him.
The gunfire ceases eventually, the screaming stops. This unbearable silence comes down like a thick blanket. Unclasping his hands, they're pale and sweaty, for a moment there’s a pang of pain shooting through his arm but he can ignore that just fine if he concentrates. The lights in the block stay on. Too bright. Humming electricity that he can almost feel echo in his skull now.
He waits.
And it’s someone else who asks an uncertain “Hello?” into the hallway.
Hidan recognises the voice as the second half of the blabbermouth duo, coming from down the hallway.
“Hey,” he calls back, still sitting up against his door.
“Oh good, someone’s still here.” The man sounds relieved.
“Not really like I can go anywhere,” Hidan says.
“You think anybody will come back for us?”
Hidan shrugs and realises too late that the other man can’t see him. The silence seems to be enough of an answer for him anyway.
“I guess not, huh?”
“Sorry, man,” Hidan says.
“They’re most likely dead,” comes a third voice. This time from the cell next to Hidan’s and he perks up as he hears the deep rough texture of it. “It’d surprise me if anyone behind that door is still alive. Even if they were, I doubt we’d be their first priority.”
Just with that he has spoken more than Hidan heard of him before, the voice still unfamiliar to him. In fact, he knows the man’s handwriting much better, but he is ready to change the status quo on that.
“So you’re saying we were abandoned?” the man from down the hallway asks with a trembling voice.
“Yeah,” comes the monosyllabic reply Hidan is used to.
For the following hours there is silence. Hidan doesn’t know why they don’t keep talking. Well, his neighbour has never seemed like the talkative type, and he himself doesn’t know what to say in the first place. Something tells him that he won’t get the answers he is looking for.
The lights stay on even after night has come. At least Hidan feels like it should be night. And the lights are on. This is new. So there really is no one out there anymore to switch them on and off. The humming stays.
Another noise startles him up to his feet again. First the thump of something soft but heavy hitting the ground, then the screech of metal against concrete. It comes from down the hallway.
“Hey, man, what’re you doing?”
No answer.
All three of their cells are on the same side, he notices, so it’s impossible to see what is going on. He hates that the most. Missing out on things. During his time inside these walls he has missed out on so much already.
There are more noises, some shuffling around, then the rattling of what Hidan realises is the metal bed frame. A snap and a screech, and he can imagine what is going on.
Still he says nothing, doesn’t call out again. If the man wants to do what he is about to do, Hidan will be the last to stop him. Sharp edges have to be good for something. A last snap. Then for a long while nothing, a tense quietness made for something to be thought over. And finally a few pained grunts, heavy breathing, and lastly sobbing as the man down the hallway.
Silence again.
Hidan thinks he sees the blood spread over the floor from under the cell’s door, just barely in his field of view.
And for some hours more his assumption is confirmed and he just watches the pool grow bigger and redder.
“He’s dead.”
“I noticed,” Kakuzu says, lying back on his bed and looking up at the ceiling.
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Neither did you.”
The man in the next cell chuckles, the sound muffled through the doors. “I’m Hidan. What’s your name?”
He should have seen it coming. Sooner or later that question was bound to return and this time he would have to answer. He sighs. “Kakuzu.”
“You’re one cold motherfucker, Kakuzu,” Hidan says but coming from him it sounds almost appreciative. “All of this absolutely doesn’t touch you in the slightest, huh?”
Kakuzu wouldn’t say that about himself. He simply doesn’t see the point in pretending to care about things that don’t matter to him. None of the people in the other cells nor the wardens mattered to him. He never bothered to even learn their names.
“I mean,” Hidan goes on and there’s the creak of his mattress, so he’s lying down now too, “The world out there just got fucked by a” He chuckles again. “By a zombie apocalypse of all things. I bet my hometown’s all gone and turned into these freaky things. Yeah, must be all gone.”
“You don’t sound too broken up about it,” Kakuzu comments.
“‘T’was a shithole. Hey, you’re pretty talkative suddenly.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“Oh no, I think I will get used to it. Come on, tell me about yourself.”
Kakuzu rolls his eyes. The lights are irritating but his inner clock, used to the routine, tells him that it’s night time and usually he would already be asleep by now. “Why would I do that?”
The smirk in Hidan’s face is audible. “Because we’re stuck here together and you’ve got no other company. We’re probably going to starve or something, so it’s not like anyone else will ever know. So, c’mon. How’d you end up here?”
Kakuzu would claim that he knows the other man’s mannerisms well enough by now. If he doesn’t get an answer out of him, he would go on to annoying lengths to provoke it out of him. For the sake of his sanity, he relents. “Killed someone.”
“How original.”
Kakuzu ignores the snide in that. “Used to work as a loan shark.”
“Oh, go on, go on.”
“That job doesn’t make you the most well-liked of people but it gets you money.” Earning all the money others were losing, he had built up quite a fortune. He lived a good, comfortable life, never spending more money than necessary and rarely for indulgences. “I was good at it,” he continues, “But that one time I misjudged the guy’s character. He turned out to be way more desperate than I expected, so when he inevitably ruined his life, he blamed his downfall on me.” Well, the man hadn’t been entirely unjustified in doing so. However, it hadn’t saved him from the consequences.
“So he was out for revenge,” Hidan guesses.
Kakuzu nods even though the other can’t see that. “That bastard killed my dogs for it.” He’d loved those dogs, all four of them. For the longest time they had been the only company that didn’t aggravate him. The closest thing he’d come to happiness. “He had a friend with him, they did it together.”
It still makes his blood boil when he thinks about it for too long. About how he found his home broken into and the howling of his dogs gone. But it makes the memory of how he paid it all back all the more satisfying, the men’s skulls smashed into bloody pulps so that their own wives could barely identify them. It had gotten him a sentence of 20 years in prison.
Hidan stays silent for a moment but the remains of his smirk are still there when he speaks up eventually. “And how did you end up here? ”
Kakuzu shrugs. “How did you?”
“Some fuckers wouldn’t leave me alone,” is the quick reply.
“There you have it.”
Assuming that they’re both just lying in their beds looking up at similar boring grey ceilings makes this conversation all the more odd, Kakuzu finds. Despite this being the solitary cell block most of the inmates still had some moral compass in them, alerting the wardens to blood or strange behaviours and the like. After a few days in solitary they had singled Kakuzu out as the odd one out since he kept to himself and preferred it that way, not eager to hold conversations. But it made him largely unproblematic in the eyes of the wardens and so they lived and let live.
Hidan was a new case. Despite the events that transpired he appeared to be unfazed by it, making a comment or two, detached as though everything was simply an unfortunate inconvenience at most.
“So, any ideas on how we can make our inevitable deaths less miserable?”
Kakuzu is close to suffocating himself in his pillow out of frustration. “Don’t you ever shut up?”
Hidan clicks his tongue. “Not like anything matters anymore. We’ll die in here.”
“Speak for yourself.” In another gesture that is lost by virtue of them being separated by a wall, Kakuzu turns away from the concrete.
Hidan takes the hint and even though it’s difficult, now that he’s got the other man talking, does his best to keep his mouth shut. The humming lights that had pleasantly fallen into background noise now seemed louder again, ear-piercingly so. He’s not sure how long he can take that anymore.
Since it’s apparently night time, he folds his hands together over his chest and prays quietly, only mouthing the words along. No answer from Jashin but from his cell neighbour. He prays and while he does he finds his thoughts slipping back to Kakuzu’s last words.
Did he imply that he would break out? That he wouldn’t allow himself to die here?
He has to be.
And that realisation unexpectedly hurts. It’s not that they have formed the closest of bonds. In fact, they have formed no bonds at all. The two of them still being here was a matter of circumstance, Hidan tries to tell himself, but his thoughts return to his prayers and all ideas of coincidences are washed away by theories about what Jashin has planned for him. So if their meeting was predestined, then the very idea of Kakuzu choosing to leave him behind… yes, it hurts. A small, annoying, stinging feeling in his chest.
He drifts off to sleep, the humming lights growing ever louder in his head and boring their way into his dreams. He dozes off and even then doesn’t sleep well. When he wakes up, he doesn’t so much wake up as he is being startled into consciousness by a loud crash.
Then another and another, and soon he realises that it has to be Kakuzu.
There’s a last heavy thump and with his face pressed up against his window Hidan watches as the neighbouring cell door breaks out of its hinges and clatters noisily to the ground. His mouth goes dry at the very sight of it while he tries to imagine the strength such a feat must take. Then Kakuzu steps out of his cell. He looks quite different from what Hidan imagined from the sound of his voice but at least regarding his height he’d been correct. He’s got brown skin, paled a little from such a long time spent indoors, long grown hair falling over his shoulders, and a short beard that only barely manages to cover up some of the scars he’s got across his face. It makes it look patchy and a little unfitting but Hidan doesn’t find it in himself to complain. It fits the broad build he has, arms as thick as trunks and perfectly suited to tackle cell doors out of their frames as it seems. Below the sleeves Hidan spots the tattoos circling his wrists. Many of the inmates had those and the person responsible had offered them to Hidan as well but he’d refused in favour of getting into the brawl that had him end up in solitary. Funny how that worked.
Out of his cell Kakuzu spares only a single glance for Hidan before making his way straight towards the security doors.
“Hey!” Hidan calls after him, “Don’t just leave me here!”
But through some means Kakuzu gets the door open. Hidan hasn’t even paid attention to that before. Whether it needed a code or a keycard, he doesn’t know. The door opens, though, and then Kakuzu pulls it shut behind him.
Hidan bangs his fists against his cell door, still calling out. He kicks, he punches with the stupid hope that one of his hits will eventually make the window shatter. People have tried before him, and while he doesn’t consider himself weak or out of shape, he has to admit that he has none of the strength Kakuzu possesses.
His calls turn into wordless cries, angry and desperate, and he hates himself a little for being so pathetic having to resort to such means. Then again it drowns out the lights, these fucking humming electric lights. If he stays alone, they will penetrate into his mind deeper and kill him before anything else can. It’s the claustrophobia setting in full-force now, kept at bay before because there were other people and that made the space around him feel bigger.
He curls up on his mattress, wraps his arms around himself, and prays. Jashin doesn’t answer him. And he gets up again, paces around in circles, lies down, gets up, circles. Hands empty and unable to grasp anything but each other. It’s not an exaggeration for him to claim that Kakuzu in the next cell had kept him sane. He fumbles under his mattress, by the corner where he keeps the newspaper scraps, just so he has something to hold while he paces, kicks the door–
“Calm down, will you?”
He stops in his tracks, head whipping up to see out the window.
Kakuzu is back. It has felt like an eternity but he is back. There’s some clicking noises and it takes Hidan a while until he understands that Kakuzu is trying out keys on his door.
“You went– you went to look for keys,” he says out loud because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to believe it. He gets up close to the window to see more. His gaze immediately drops down though, when he notices the red soaking the front of Kakuzu’s prison jumpsuit, some droplets of blood even having made it onto his face.
Kakuzu notices him noticing. “They’re everywhere out there. I hope you’re not more trouble than you’re worth.”
“I’m not,” Hidan says defensively but the thought that Kakuzu had taken the risk and is trying to free him makes that annoying, stinging feeling subside. Instead his heart beats just a little faster, just a little warmer.
“You’ve killed someone?” Kakuzu asks, still trying out keys.
Hidan nods. “A few, yeah.”
“How’d it feel?” He actually looks up and Hidan feels like he’s being scrutinized under that stern look in his eyes. They’re hard and cold, a dark shade of green, and difficult to look away from.
Hidan’s mouth twitches into an excited grin. “Pretty damn good.”
It seems to be the correct answer because Kakuzu’s expression softens just the slightest bit and after some more tries he finally finds the right key and the cell door clicks open. It’s like the air changes taste, it’s easier to breathe suddenly and Hidan can no longer keep his grin down no matter how hard he tries. Even the view of the pool of blood from the man at the end of the hallway does nothing to deter him from the fact that he’s free again. Free to walk the earth and do whatever he wants.
Kakuzu keeps the keys and waits for him by the security doors. Hidan almost can’t believe that he finally makes his way through there without a warden breathing down his neck. Just as they’re outside – another hallway but somehow everything seems bigger now, less limiting because he can go wherever he wants – Kakuzu presses a steel pipe into his hands, holding onto one of his own as well.
Right.
The hallways of the prison are in disarray, paperwork spread over the floors and chairs strewn around. For a while he just looks around, following Kakuzu through the building and down the flights of stairs.
“We could stay and secure everything again,” Hidan proposes half-seriously, “It’d be a pretty safe place.”
Kakuzu shakes his head. “Hordes, demons, the fucking devil can’t keep me in here. I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.” He glances at Hidan over his shoulder. “You can do what you want.”
Hidan scoffs. “You kidding? I’m sticking with you. Don’t look at me like that. You were practically the only thing keeping me sane in there.” He still has the paper scraps in his pocket.
Kakuzu grits his teeth. “The second you stop being useful to me I’m getting rid of you.”
“Got it, old bastard.”
The prison’s upper floors are free of any undead walking around. Only when they’re down on the ground level is when they encounter groups of two or three together. They spot the zombies before those spot them and Hidan feels the familiar feeling of adrenaline rising in his blood. The beating of his heart that means he’s as alive as he’ll ever be, and when he kills his first zombie, putting all his weight into the crushing hits with the pipe and not stopping even long after cracking the skull open, it feels like freedom.
Kakuzu finds the storage rooms, a more secluded part so that they can look around in peace, and by chance Hidan finds a cardboard box with his name on it. In it his pendant.
Maybe Jashin has listened all along.