Bound

Chapter one

His scythe was nowhere to be found, and his clothes were all tattered. Dried blood and dust covered him from head to toe, sticking to every part of his skin, which was now also littered with stitches. It felt like he had been revived, raised from his earthly prison, free to wander the earth again and do God's bidding.

Hidan laughed hoarsely because he could. Never had he imagined that he would have missed the sky so much. The colours, the light, it all created such a stunning and vivid picture. He stretched his arms to the sides, because he could, and basked in the glory which was freedom.

Kakuzu's monster, a mask Hidan did not remember, started to crawl away. It dragged itself forward so slowly, and looked truly pitiful.

"Hey," Hidan called after it. "Where are you going?" Could those things even talk? Could it hear him? It showed no sign to have registered Hidan at all, and so he walked towards it on wobbling, unsteady legs – weak by malnourish – and touched its back. Kakuzu's threads had always had a disgusting texture, slick and yet rough at the same time, but Hidan made sure to grab the threads still to stop the creature.

The monster ceased its crawling, and turned around to look at him with the soulless eyes of the mask. All of Kakuzu's masks had portrayed different emotions, from Hidan's understanding. Looking at the white mask with the wide empty eyes, and the absurd human shape of it, he read despair. But it said nothing.

After a prolonged eye contact with the mask, Hidan suddenly wondered why it was there. Following his burial, Hidan had been sure that Kakuzu would kill all of the brats and then come and get him. He had never once doubting his partner's abilities. But then time had passed, he never knew how much, and his faith had started to waver. Maybe Kakuzu, merciless and cruel as he was, had decided to leave Hidan in his hole. That thought had made him just as furious as it had made him frightened. And maybe, he had realized, Kakuzu had lost.

At the broken eye contact, the monster started to crawl away again, and Hidan decided that he might as well follow. Weak in body, it would be for the best to have a partner. Furthermore, there was nothing Hidan loathed as much as loneliness.

It was a good thing that the monster crawled at such a slow pace, Hidan thought. He kept up mostly by leaning against trees. He needed food, and his strength back, if he ever hoped to serve God again.

At the sighting of a rabbit, Hidan's eyes went wide with hunger.

"Kill it," he ordered the monster, but his words did nothing but scare away the animal. Angered, Hidan grabbed the monster's threads tightly. "Listen, I need food, seriously, so you've got to help me, got it?" he ranted feverishly against the creature. His voice was hoarse and filled with a hunger-induced panic, yet the creature showed no sign of understanding.

Gritting his teeth, Hidan let go of the threads. His stomach growled at him, but he could do nothing to help. Even a vegetable, or a fruit, would be welcomed at that moment.

The full moon shone down at him through the forest canopy, brightening up the path he walked next to the crawling monster. But what did light help him, when he had no direction and no fuel? Anger was rising in his chest, but he could not muster up enough energy to let it out, or channel it into something useful.

When he spotted a doe, he thought that he might be hallucinating. But then the monster beside him shot forth its threads, which impaled the animal mercilessly from every angle. The skewering made Hidan flinch, though he had never been bothered before by Kakuzu's threads. This time however, it reminded him of the shadow boy's binding shade. The shadow had bound him, and pierced his own flesh, and there had been nothing wonderful about that pain.