Chapter Text
Lily is confused.
Now, that’s not exactly an uncommon occurrence. Lily is often confused. But this? This takes the fucking cake.
Either she’s in the most batshit insane hallucination, or she’s currently in the body of Hidan. Of the Akatsuki. From fucking Naruto.
She lifts the unfamiliar arm and runs it across her face and grimaces at the tacky feeling of blood and sweat and viscera as it clings to her skin. She’s lying on the ground with the symbol of Jashin beneath her, and there are dead bodies strewn around the clearing.
Either this is the most detailed dream in the world. Or she’s now a fictional immortal maniac.
Oh god.
—
Her desperate wish that she wasn’t in the Akatsuki yet is immediately dashed as she finds the robe several feet away. It’s in ribbons from when something seemingly ripped it apart.
Just as she’s about to break down and start sobbing, Kakuzu comes gliding through the trees. He’s staring down at a little black book and Lily feels a moment of panic before she schools her expression into a scowl. How did Hidan act? Recklessly, right? She could be reckless. She could swear. How hard could it be?
She opens her mouth to call Kakuzu a fucking shitstain heathen and promptly bursts into tears.
Kakuzu startles at her sobs and his face twists in confusion. She thinks a little hysterically that he probably doesn’t know what to do when his homicidal idiot partner does something disgusting like crying .
And then he throws a kunai at her neck.
It burns a path right through her throat and out the other side and her blood is slipping past her fingers as she scrambles to keep it in and what the actual fuck was that for?
Anger, quicksilver and indignant, flares in her chest. Her throat is mangled but already healing enough for this.
“You shitty spaghetti ass bitch!”
Her words are almost indecipherable but Kakuzu apparently gets the gist because he grunts and turns to check one of the bodies, ignoring her.
Lily holds her neck together and thinks a little spitefully that if he did that to get her to shut up then he’s gonna have to try a little harder than that.
“What was that for, huh?”
“Shut up.”
“Make me, godless heathen.”
He turns, his freaky eyes unblinking, and Lily learns very quickly that he can very much make her shut the fuck up and that she needs to close her mouth before he does it for her. But… that’s what Lily would do, isn’t it? And that’s the problem. She can’t do what Lily wants, she needs to be Hidan.
So she opens her mouth-
And he cuts her vocal cords out.
Fuck it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts and he’s shoving a chunk of her throat into his pocket like it’s a fucking wallet and she remembers that Hidan cant heal until his pieces are back in place and oh my god how did she even get here in the first place -
“Get up. Let’s go. We’re wasting time.”
Stumbling, she follows.
—
Lily is incredibly lucky that this body remembers how to move like a shinobi because she would be completely fucked without it.
As they run through the trees, Lily fiddles with the pendant around her neck and wonders. She arrived here after the original Hidan had performed a ritual. So maybe if she does one too then she’ll be sent back? To her real body? She stumbles as a terrifying thought emerges. Did she.. switch places with Hidan? Is there a fictional character running around in her real body? Shuddering, Lily beats that thought back with a stick.
All she knows for sure is that she’s an imposter pretending to be Hidan in a world of paranoid ninja. What she needs is to essentially infiltrate the scariest S-rank organization in the world via impersonating Hidan until she can figure out how to get home.
She’s fucked.
That night, after they pick up the bounties of the men Hidan had killed and Kakuzu contentedly adds the money to his many pockets, she taps his shoulder and holds out a hand. Kakuzu sighs and reaches into a bloody pocket and pulls out her larynx. Snatching it back, she fiddles with the chunk of flesh for a moment (gross gross gross) before he seemingly takes pity on her and a long thin tendril pokes out of his arm (ew) and sews it back in place.
They make camp under a sky full of stars. There isn’t a need to keep watch, not really. They’re a pair of immortal S-rank shinobi. She could be sleeping. Instead, Lily lies awake and stares at the beautiful mosaic of lights. She thinks about light pollution and how foreign the constellations are. She doesn’t want to think about her situation, so she thinks about stars instead. Simple balls of gas in the sky.
And then she glances at the moon and remembers that it’s not just a big rock, that it instead used to house the dead corpse of a ten tailed beast. The ten tailed beast her current employers were trying to revive. Hmm.
Better to not think of anything at all.
She sleeps.
And when she wakes, she ignores the headache building behind her eyes.
—
Kakuzu eyes his partner out of the corner of his eye and notes how listless and tired he seems. It’s been a week since his last ritual, the seeming catalyst to his subdued behavior. He’s noticed that Hidan seems to be sleeping less and less and stumbling more and more. Food doesn’t seem to interest him beyond the requirement for sustenance, and neither does the promise of fighting.
It’s… and he doesn’t think this lightly… concerning.
So as they pass the next quaint little village, he mentally adds to the money Hidan owes him and stops at the inn. He notices Hidan perking up at the sign to the bathhouse and grudgingly adds more hotels to his planned route.
He supposes that while they are an initial investment, it will be easier to encounter bounties near inns than it would be camping for free in the woods. Perhaps this will reap multiple rewards.
After acquiring a room and after he sees Hidan wander towards the baths, Kakuzu once again approaches the matron to the inn. She pales upon seeing him and stutters a question about the room being satisfactory that he ignores.
“I have a… dog… that is increasingly despondent as of late. What is wrong with it.”
She stammers out something about depression and he grunts.
“How do I fix it.”
“... t-treats? Enrichment?”
Hmm.
—
Rubbing fingers against her eyes, Lily wonders how hard she would have to push for the headache to go away. It’s been three weeks and she’s still here. Two days ago Kakuzu found two new bounties to hunt, and yesterday he killed the first one. She had to turn away and pretend that the murder was disgusting because it was for money and not because she couldn’t stomach to watch.
She’s beginning to give up any hope of going home. Her one possible solution involves a freaky ritual that she’s a little wary of attempting.
Lily picks under her nails as they wait for the other target’s caravan to come down the road. There’s a joke somewhere in her head about two S-rank shinobi waiting to rob a caravan like a common bandit- it would be a little funny if she wasn’t the one currently sitting in a tree.
Ahead of her, Kakuzu snaps his book closed and cracks his knuckles. Craning her neck, Lily looks around the trunk of her tree and sees a cart rumbling down the dirt track.
Aw fuck.
Like a stone, Kakuzu drops from the tree, swift and sure. His feet hit the dirt without a sound, and Hidan sees the caravan try to swerve around him. Unfortunately for them, Kakuzu sends one of his arms rocketing towards the wheels, gray threads whirring. It connects with a crack and the corner of the cart slams to the ground. She hears a pained yell as the whole thing grinds to a halt.
Lily stays in her tree.
Kakuzu, arm already retracted, stalks toward the unfortunate nobleman and the even more unfortunate man guarding him.
They never stood a chance.
It’s after he’s done wiping the blood off his hands that Kakuzu tosses something small and wrapped at her. The paper crinkles in her hands.
Giving him a suspicious look, Lily slowly unwraps it to see.. a granola bar?
Kakuzu watches her with his dark eyes and he seems almost expectant, so Lily shrugs and takes a bite.
And immediately almost spits it back out.
“What the fuck is this? It’s rock hard and tastes like ass!” Her words are muffled by the questionable food in her mouth.
“A snack.” He looks subtly disappointed and Lily despairs at the fact that she’s spent enough time here to read his moods. Did he make this thing? Kakuzu? A homemade snack?
Not one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, even if she’s 80% sure it cracked a tooth, she musters up a better expression.
“Thanks, I guess. It was acceptable.”
He clearly doesn’t believe her bullshit because he turns without another word and starts scribbling in his notebook.
“What about the dude’s head?” She asks.
Kakuzu starts walking.
“Hey! I don’t want to carry this one too!”
—
The first time they face shinobi- actual real life shinobi- Lily gets dragged by her ankles into the ground and is entirely useless for the rest of the fight.
The face the random rock nin made when he slit her throat and nothing happened was kind of funny though.
Less funny was Kakuzu’s rage at having to dig her out with an earth jutsu. He deliberately squeezes her body, ribs compressing painfully with the weight of the earth while he delivers a stern lecture on pulling her own weight. God it sounded like her dad trying to get her to mow the lawn.
Slightly delirious with lack of oxygen and the cut on her neck and the presence of several still warm bodies, Lily nods until he lets her out of the earth.
—
In her dreams she is underwater, a crimson sea that threatens to consume her. She’s in her real body, not Hidan’s, which is a small comfort as she sinks deeper and deeper and deeper. Pressure builds, pressing long fingers against her skin and inside her head as water goes up her nose and she’s choking, pulling deep swallows of red into her lungs. Her head feels like a ripe melon, ready to burst and something unseen lurks beneath her legs and-
Lily wakes up with a start, chest heaving. Her skull feels like it’s splitting open with a migraine and there’s a bone deep feeling of dread clinging to her skin but for the life of her she can’t remember anything about the nightmare that must have woken her. All she’s left with is the sounds of her breathing, the wrong heart fluttering in the wrong chest.
The body she inhabits is unfamiliar and wrong and all she wants is to go home.
Suddenly, she scrambles for a kunai, for a knife, for anything at all because there are ants crawling beneath her skin and there’s fire in her veins and water in her lungs she needs to crawl out of this fuckin body, peel it away like the skin of an orange so she can go home .
Just as she’s about to start clawing at her wrists with her nails Kakuzu walks into their camp (she didn’t even notice he was gone) and throws a bound man at her feet. It startles her out of whatever manic mood overcame her and she blinks, confused.
“Here’s a heathen or whatever. Have fun.”
… what? The fuck?
Lily watches, blank, as the man starts wriggling out of the ropes. Kakuzu does nothing as he desperately scrambles to untie himself, and suddenly Lily knows that this is her only chance to perform a ritual without having to hunt down someone herself. She’s not a shinobi, she’s not even a fighter. If she tried to find someone, she’d never catch them, and that’s if she didn’t chicken out first.
She probably needs a good chunk of time spent throwing herself at a sparring partner. Preferably not Kakuzu. But that’s beside the point. There’s a perfectly good sacrifice candidate currently halfway out of his ropes. All she has to do is brutally murder him. No big deal.
And then he’s running, and the decision is made for her. Her body, Hidan’s body, reaches for a kunai on autopilot and flicks it at his leg, neatly hamstringing him. He drops like a stone.
In the back of her mind she is screaming, but the overwhelming portion just wants to go home, and these people aren’t even real anyways, what do they matter?
She doesn’t pray. She doesn’t even know the words. She just picks up the kunai and licks it, copper spilling over her tongue. And suddenly, she knows soul deep the steps to a dance she never learned. It’s second nature to split her palm, and draw a symbol on the blood soaked dirt. Power, heady and dark, flows into her as black and white shapes mark her skin. Lily has never felt anything like this. She knows now. Knows this man’s pain and agony but also his triumphs too.
But she also knows that this will not send her home. She can feel the truth of it seep into her bones, caress her lungs. She can feel the man’s heart beating, fluttering, futile, a jackrabbit’s rhythm to her steady drum. But she can also feel another presence. There is a gaping maw closing in, teeth glinting in the light, the shadow beneath her feet. She is not alone in this state in between life and death and this will not send her home.
So she takes the blade and plunges it deep into her chest until she feels both hearts shudder and still as one.
The shadow smiles.
—
She wakes up one winter morning to a flare of chakra. The ring on her left hand pulses, and she watches as Kakuzu flexes his hand before looking down at it.
“Well. Let’s see what our esteemed leader wants this time.” Kakuzu mutters, before he holds up a hand sign and stills. Scrambling to copy him, Lily carefully makes the seal and closes her eyes.
It’s like putting on a virtual reality headset. One moment she’s looking at some frost covered trees, and the next she’s looking at the face of the creepiest statue ever, beside the holographic forms of her fellow members. But just like a headset, she can still feel the biting chill on her skin, the snow beneath her feet.
She looks around the cave and notes the shadow-forms of Pein and Konan first. Zetsu is a close second, and when her eyes skitter off of his form and land on Itachi’s blazing sharingan, Lily regrets her life choices. At least Obito isn’t here. She quickly focuses on the beady black eyes of Kisame instead. Good old Kisame. No secret ulterior motives with that dude. Just a good old fashioned missing nin.
Pein’s deep timbre gains her attention.
“Sasori and Deidara will reach Sunagakure tomorrow. Get somewhere suitable for a sealing. You know the drill. Dismissed.”
And just as suddenly as the meeting started, it ends, and she’s blinking at the harsh light of the sun bouncing off the snow.
Damn. They were hunting Gaara already? Jesus fuck she’s running out of time to figure shit out.
Kakuzu grunts and turns around, presumably to head back to the village they passed half a day ago.
Should she… save him? She could delay the sealing, even a little bit, and perhaps the Konoha nin and Chiyo would arrive in time. But even as she contemplates it, as she thinks of ways to save the little jinchuuriki, the shadow that has dogged her steps this entire time, the presence behind her shoulder, it bleeds satisfaction.
And Lily, who knows , who has known, who just didn’t want to acknowledge the monster in the room, shudders and decides to leave Gaara to his fate. There is nothing she wants less than to satisfy him . And if saving Gaara will for some godforsaken reason do that, then Gaara could burn in the pits of hell for all she cared. Besides, he survived canon in the end.
He’d be fine.
Probably.
With a shuddering sigh, she follows behind Kakuzu once again. She’s getting a little fucking sick of walking across the elemental nations. There’s only so long you can live in fear and tension before it loses its edge.
“Maaaa Kakuzuuuu… are we there yet?” Lily drawls, pushing her luck. Kakuzu shoots her a dark glare and she smiles, all teeth.
“I will kill you one of these days.” He growls.
She’s either feeling particularly brave or stupid.
“Nah, you secretly love me ya big softy.”
Ahh. Stupid it is.
A kunai whizzes towards her. Lily tilts her head so it flashes past her ear instead. Enough time in this wrong wrong wrong body has allowed some of its instincts to settle. What the mind forgets, the body remembers.
She flashes him a sharp grin.
Narrowing his eyes, Kakuzu growls and flashes forward, arm outstretched. Giddy, Lily dances away on light feet and let’s a giggle build in her chest. So far, being in this body has been terrifying and strange and lonely. But despite the promise of pain should he catch her, there is freedom and pleasure in being so fast. So strong.
When he grabs her ankle and removes her hands at the wrists, well, at least he left her legs intact.
Probably so he wouldn’t have to carry her.
—
Exhausted beyond belief from the sealing of the one-tails, Lily slumps into a jangly mess of limbs next to Kakuzu.
Lily glances over Kakuzu’s shoulder and peeks at his notebook. Instead of the meticulous record keeping she expects to see, there is a handwritten list with several things crossed out.
Treats
Enrichment
Baths?
Saunas
Killing
SPARRING
The last entry has been circled several times.
“What… what are you doing?” She asks, bemused.
Kakuzu snaps his book shut with a sharp thwap.
“It’s time to head back to Ame.”
Lily suppresses the jolt those words send through her but fails to stop her hands from clenching. Kakuzu sends her a pointed glance and she does what she does best. Deflection.
“Would it kill you to answer a question once in a while?” She whines, pretending like she’s not currently panicking twelve ways to Sunday. Lily’s not ready to face the rest of the Akatsuki. She’s only just gotten used to the one.
“Hidan.”
She pauses.
“Let’s go.”
They go.
Soon the terrain goes from sandy, to rocky, to sparsely populated with trees. And the once temperate air seemingly drops about ten degrees. The air is wet, but the rain doesn’t start in earnest until they're closer to the border. Whatever she thought Ame would look like, some sort of distorted metropolitan city wasn't it. The whole place reeks of ‘pretentious art installation’. Metal buildings stand several stories high and for someone who used to live in the 21st century it wasn't particularly impressive but for someone who’s spent the last several months among small towns it was intimidating. Trying not to stare so obviously as Hidan should know the place, Lily follows Kakuzu to the tallest tower in the distance. Whatever she was expecting for the Akatsuki, a fancy highrise wasn’t it.
She figured there would be more caves.
There’s been enough caves haunting her dreams, why not throw some in real life.
The interior is spacious and grand, with lovely vases filled with origami flowers, and intricate paintings lining the walls. She stumbles after her partner as he makes his way upstairs. They come across a grand ballroom and inside sits Pein in all his glory, rinnegan eyes seemingly seeing right through her. She almost panics then and there.
“Hidan. Kakuzu. Report.”
She lets Kakuzu take the wheel and when he’s done with his spiel simply waves a hand and says “What he said.”
Sweat drips down her back at Pein’s unamused stare. Lily absently wonders where Nagato is hiding. Konan sighs and Lily starts. How long was she standing there? She didn’t even see her. But my god, now that she has? Konan is incredibly hot and terrifying and beautiful and she maybe falls in love a little. And then immediately quashes the feeling. God. Don't be weird.
“Dismissed.”
Oh thank god.
Lily tries not to hurry out of the room and lets out a sigh of relief when the doors close behind her. And then immediately panics because she doesn't know where to go. Above them, she can hear distant shouting and a small explosion and decides fuck it. Upstairs is better than standing around lost like an idiot. Only when she climbs the stairs, she comes across a blond with one arm- Deidara- animatedly yelling at someone in an orange mask.
Lily sets eyes on that orange mask and almost blacks out as an overwhelming urge to kill him steals her breath away. It's so strong it takes several long seconds of gripping her arm to realize it's not her. The shadow that dogs her steps has never been closer, never felt so alive. And it wants her to kill Obito Uchiha.
Lily slams her fist into the wall and staggers away, ignoring the high, cloyingly fake cry of “Hidan-sempai!”.
As the catalyst for so many wrong things, killing Obito now would be very beneficial to several people’s well-being. But that seems to be exactly what Jashin wants- and that is something she cannot allow. Satisfying the god of suffering is not the ideal outcome. She stumbles away until she finds a vacant room to hide in.
As if to punish her, she is not allowed a single night of rest. Every hour, waking or asleep, is plagued by nightmares, twisted dreams that leave her gasping in the dark. And always, always, that damn cave. It takes everything in her to not go feral and start killing people. Deidara has taken to eyeing her like a rabid dog and god dammit it feels accurate.The bloodlust is very real- like a constant hunger for violence that leaves her achingly empty every night it goes unfulfilled.
Kill them. You could save so many. What are you waiting for?
She doesn’t know. Salvation, maybe.
—
She tells Pein that she needs to commune with her god, that it’s a deeply private affair that a heathen wouldn’t understand.
And it’s the truth, in a way.
If going to the freaky cave will get him to stop invading her dreams, then Lily will go to the damn cave.
It takes her a solid week to get there, struggling through nightmares and her pitiful attempts at hunting food.
Deep in Yugakure, where the land meets the sea, she finds a natural looking cavern. The cave cuts open the cliff face like a gaping mouth. With waves crashing against tall spears of rock, the sound is deafening. She doesn’t doubt this is the right place. The beat of her headache pounding like a drum is proof enough.
Lily steps out across the waves and slowly enters the cave, the sun high at her back. Light streaks across the water at her feet and she kicks a rock, watching it sail into the gloom of the cave. When nothing happens, she cautiously continues.
However, as soon as she passes some invisible threshold, any indication of the outside world vanishes. The light from the sun disappears. It’s as if someone cut off her senses, and for a second she thinks something is wrong with her until she hears the rustle of her cloak, the gasp of her breath. She should absolutely still be able to hear the ocean, the waves crashing against the shore, but it’s almost silent.
Around her feet, the water begins to glow. Disturbed but grateful for the light source, Lily glances back and curses. The huge opening to the sea has disappeared completely, and instead there’s nothing but damp stone. Scowling, hands trembling, Lily walks deeper into the cursed cave, a faint glow following her steps.
With only one long winding path to follow, at the very least she doesn’t have to worry about getting lost. How gracious of him to at least be linear in this one thing. Everything else just has to be cryptic but at least his cave isn’t.
She finally steps into a monstrous cavern and knows that this is it.
There is no great flash of light, no theatrics. Jashin simply unfurls onto this plane as if he always was and always will be here, in this cave, looking down upon her. For a greater term of look. Lily’s mind quails before him as he is everything and nothing and all and one at once. The greater laws of physics cannot hold a god. She stands before him, and feels a great weight upon her.
And then it speaks.
“Do you know why I call for mass slaughter? Kill thy neighbor? ” Jashin asks, terrible in the way an approaching storm is terrific and awesome in equal measure.
“Uhhhh you’re a fucking freak?” She guesses, mouth escaping her.
The weight triples for a moment, and Lily shudders, limbs trembling under the pressure that the full attention of a god affords.
“No. It is because for every life that my followers cut short... I gain strength from that wasted potential. All of those endless possibilities of action, of will, of struggle … I c o n s u m e them.” The being continues, voice echoing yet soundless, swirling yet hanging still in the cavern.
She doesn’t understand, not really, but she nods anyway.
“Do you know why I tolerate your presence? Why I accepted the loss of my most faithful? Because you, little light, have the ability to give me a feast. The disruption to the timeline your very presence brings… and you could destroy it even more. Bring the very future to its knees. Do you know how d e l i c i o u s a failed prophecy is? And you can give me that.”
Lily feels a spark of anger. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you cannot bear the thought of dying. Because you could prevent so much pain. Because you rage and rage and rage against the dying of the light .” He mocks.
And Lily pales, because the only place he could have gotten that quote was from the inside of her very head, from the memories of the only place she thought was safe from him.
“Fuck you. I won’t help you.”
And Jashin sees right through her, and he laughs and laughs and laughs as she stumbles away from his domain.